Restarting a torrent

[Zeerover]

I thought I'd try seeding a torrent that I had downloaded a few days earlier. I had saved the torrent file and moved the associated torrent data folder to a different drive. so, I followed the instructions in the faq about renaming a torrent (http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#How_can_I_rename_a_torrent_folder.3F) I loaded the torrent file without starting it, then went to advanced and set the download directory, started the torrent and utorrent promptly started overwriting my good data. uTorrent didn't realize it was a completed torrent as the faq seems to indicate. Did I do something wrong or what? If that isn't how you restart a torrent for seeding. How do you do it?

[Lord Alderaan]

I had that happen to me too once or twice although not recently. I can only guess µtorrent did a hash check, found all pieces to be incorrect and restarted everything. I think something happened during moving those files which caused them to have a different hash (while not being corrupt).

Nowadays I always save a copy before if I reseed something just to be sure. (Then again I got oceans of HD space)

[Switeck]

Moving is not instantaneous for larger files. So like you said, it's probably quite likely the torrents were in a moving/locked state when µTorrent tried to access them again.

[Lord Alderaan]

In my case where utorrent deleted all the old data and restarted downloading I had moved the data to another partition. Locked state of files in windows is complex. Even if a file was 'locked' why would µtorrent not be able to continue the file but be able to delete the content. Because of pre-allocation the files seem unharmed from the size but they were empty.

Anyways I'm pretty sure it was done copying because I usually reseed stuv hours to days later besides that I'm mindful of that kinda stuv.

But it was a long time ago and hasn't happened to me since. As I said I think it was a corruption problem instead of a µtorrent specific problem. Maybe I even used another .torrent file which had the same filenames but slightly different files and thus different hashes.

In any case the fact that your files were actually overwritten with empty ones probably means you did it right. Just that something went wrong. There is only two pieces of advice. Backup what you want to reseed and make sure its the exact same .torrent file.

[Switeck]

I don't know then. Maybe for some weird reason it was in the hard drive's controller ram buffer but not committed to disk yet? But even that makes no sense hours later!

One thing that might make µTorrent overwrite all the files is a specific kind of corruption:

an additional byte near the beginning of the file/s. Everything afterwards is shifted 1 byte, so nothing matches.

This is ESPECIALLY bad if the torrent/s happen to come with a windows thumbnail stored at the beginning. When moved to another folder, the thumbnail either doesn't get moved or Windows XP recreates it in the new folder with a different size!