PLEASE can someone HELP (restoring utorrent settings and queue after restore from backup) - not reading settings.dat

[me929292]

Firstly, please accept my application for total TW@t of the century award.

I'm HOPING that SOMEONE can help.

PROBLEM : I deleted all the files in my %APPDATA%\utorrent folder, relaunched utorrent and of course EVERYTHING is GONE.

I did use RECUVA to get all the files back, renamed settings.dat.old to settings.dat and resume.dat.old to resume.dat but utorrrent still comes up blank. 

=================[ update following research ]============================

It appears I was on the right track to rename the .old settings and resume.dat's but utorrent does not seem to pick them up in that, after re-launching utorrent the queue is blank and looking at Preferences these are the defaults, not mine.

The .old files seem to be correct as they are much bigger.

Settings wise I did change the location of downloaded files/finished torrents etc. (see below)

 

FURTHER UPDATE AFTER MORE TESTS

I noticed a couple of new .dmp files so decided to try restoring again and look at the logger, this is what I found which I think explains things, the settings.dat and resume.dat from the recovery appear to be damaged. I do have a couple more resume.dat_x.old files so will try them but my settings look like toast. I can re-enter the location changes and the other stuff I changed was mostly from forum posts for more efficient running so can probably replicate (not my main problem though). I do have a backup from 5 years ago which actually won't be far off.

Does resume.dat store ALL current queue information? torrent status etc. (i.e. which parts have been downloaded), also label info (I had quite a few 'label folders')

 

Still trying to resolve this, hope someone can help with maybe some key thing that I am missing.

I did try one of the other resume.dat's AND a backup settings.dat from 2015 

The 2015 settings is no good, it did seem to accept (no log errors) the resume.dat from one of the other .old files but doesn't bring anything up

I was wondering if it is referencing any other files/folders in order to bring up the queue? maybe the .torrent file folder or where the in-progress and down torrents are?

Have now amended the Preferences to show my folder structure. Saved and checked they are still active on restart. I then created a resume.dat, resume.dat.old and a resume.dat.new from what I think is a valid resume.dat (old) backup (in that it doesn't give errors in the log).

I created the .new file as without it the log says failed to find resume.dat.new

Still no joy I'm afraid.

 

[me929292]

 

I havent totally given up and really hope someone can provide that missing bit of info that may allow me to get my queue back. It was massive as I'm a diligent seeder for a number of sites and keep 100s of torrent live but stopped in case of requests. Many of those are 'partials' where I didn't need all the files in the torrent. I also had loads that had stalled part way through but often complete over time. It would be a massive task to try and get anywhere near recreating this BUT

I have all the .torrent files, I have all the torrent folders with files, part files, torrent.dat files

IF I can't recover this situation, what would be the quickest way to get at least a chunk of this back, at least some of the more important/recent stuff?

I'm thinking :

1) load some of the .torrent files back in

2) do a Force recheck

3) adjust accordingly

I think 1) may be possible using an AUTOLOAD folder. The one with my .torrent files in it is over 8,000 files, there's no way I had 8,000 torrents in the queue and can see 100's that are old/archived data and deleted, I do normally "delete .torrent and data" so not sure why they are there but I have found when I download a torrent it is stored in 2 places.

And of course, LOTs of magnet links used recently so assume nothing I can do about that?

What a nightmare, not sure even if a backup would have resolved this as In appear to have got at least a valid resume,dat back but it is just not being referenced?

[PiusX]

Recovery means everything after that image is gone and must be manually recreated. There is nothing that can be done at this point. If you had saved the utorrent app folder data you might've had a chance to restore it but since that wasn't saved then nothing can be done here. All utorrent activities or files after that image will be gone. Without the app/data folder all those torrent must be re-created or found where you got them to restart them from "0" bytes is what's going to happen is what I recall. The problem here is if the folder you saved didn't replace the other one created with the image it will not work correctly.

[PiusX]

On 2/14/2021 at 10:44 AM, me929292 said:

Firstly, please accept my application for total TW@t of the century award.

I'm HOPING that SOMEONE can help.

PROBLEM : I deleted all the files in my %APPDATA%\utorrent folder, relaunched utorrent and of course EVERYTHING is GONE.

This right here would be the biggest problem once that is wipe clean nothing can be done here.

[me929292]

 

Thanks, as I mentioned, I did recover that folder in it's entirety. 

It did appear that settings.dat wasn't read (no errors) but did give me an error saying that resume.dat was corrupt.

I did have a number of (very) recent resume.dat's so renamed a couple of those after having amended the settings to match the changes I had made before (essentially just file locations).

These renamed resume.dat's didn't give any errors BUT there was nothing in the queue.

I'm therefore wondering if there is more to it and I'm missing something?

Does resume.dat really store ALL the queue data and individual torrents status'?

Does it reference any other data, anywhere else?

Reason for asking is that I've tried at least 3 resume.dat.old files, all of which are VERY recent and none seem to restore the queue OR give any errors?

Thanks

 

 

[PiusX]

What you recovered was the last app/data folder at the time the recovery image was made not the current app/data folder you had before you did the recovery. Anything after that would be missing or corrupted as you mentioned because the app/data folder data has gone bad as a result of that. If you had backup the app/data folder and deleted the recovered image of the previous app/data folder with the backup one that would've restored your torrent settings but as that wasn't not done there is nothing that can be done to help here. Once that is gone it's gone and you will have to start over those torrent using the torrent .ut files to redo or restart the torrent from "0" bytes or if it find the exact torrent to resume where it last stopped. So beyond these two measures if both can't be done then there is nothing more this forum can help with since that wasn't a utorrent caused issue.

[me929292]

 

Thanks, I was hoping the .old files, as they were only a few minutes 'older' than the 'live' one I deleted would work. I doubt there would have been any changes to the queue in that time, possibly adding a torrent or two, maybe deleting one.

I've made the decision to start from scratch, which was no easy decision as there were 4,300+ torrents in the queue as I keep many private torrent files 'live' although not all seeding of course so I can respond to reseed requests. That's not a huge issue apart from the time it will take to re-add the torrent (as stopped), set all contents to download, do a forced recheck, set all those at 0% to [Don't download] and restart (many torrents I have only partially downloaded, i.e. certain episodes).

A lot of those 4,300+ were also only partially downloaded or 'stalled' which I found would often complete over time (have had some 'come back' for over many months).

Realistically there is no way I am going to get those 4,300 back, looking just at private tracker downloads I want to keep seeding we are talking may 600-800 which I'll do over the coming weeks. There's maybe a couple of hundred more that I'd also want to re-instate.

In trying to 'carry on' whilst leaving utorrent install untouched I moved to my win7 laptop, sadly 2.2.1 would not allow me to connect to my most used site (tvchoas) so ended up trying a few alternatives, qBitorrent, Vuze, BiglyBt but none give me the flexibility of utorrent so I'm going to continue with 2.2.1 whilst maybe looking into the latest utorrent. I did have many reasons for staying with 2.2.1 in the past but not sure of the current situation).

So, saying that, I'm keen to understand the backup options in 2.2.1 

Firstly, mental note, don't delete the /utorrent folder again (99% of it was old, no longer active .torrent files, didn't see the .dat's)

BUT, should I get some corruption of the settings or resume.dat files, how useful are the .old files? is it possible to use them to get back to an 'earlier' state EVEN IF one or two of the torrents that were in that queue are not there anymore?

Just to 're-ask' a question from before, does the RESUME.DAT file contain ALL the torrent queue information, ALL the entries, all the status's, all the individual files states (high, normal, skip etc.) ?

I did once have a problem after a crash that all the 'skipped' files in a WIP torrent were reset to normal, would that likely to have been a resume.dat corruption?

Many thanks, sadly I've a huge job to get back to a reasonable state but I appreciate all the help given.

 

 

 

 

[PiusX]

If any parts of the app/data folder is corrupted it probably won't work to restore in it's entirety as a whole all those files more or less has to be checked for integrity to work together and mixing and matching will not fix it. I've done it with 2.2.1 and before recovery image I backup the app/data folder and then deleted the recovered image app/data folder and copy back the backup app/data folder and then restarted utorrent and all my files and actions where back. But this also means there must not be any hardware or utorrent settings changed saved location from that point on otherwise you will have to go and redo each file themselves.