All Torrents gone, after reboot

[khyber]

Heya.

I'm a pretty "heavy" uTorrent user. I mean, it's running all day and I hardly have any problems with it, just a few crashes from time to time (maybe because I have almost 600 torrents loaded (most of them are seeding)).

Today, I had to manually restart my laptop (running Windows XP SP2), because it freezed. After the restart, I immediately started uTorrent (after I plugged in my external hard drive, where most of my downloads are stored).

I was kinda shocked when I saw the uTorrent screen. It was "blank". I mean, there were no torrents in the list, see here what I'm talking about:

After that "shock", I closed uTorrent and restarted it (which hopefully wasn't a mistake concerning the ability to restore my torrent tasks), but nothing changed.

Then I made a backup of uTorrent's Application Data folder (well, I probably only need resume.dat, right?), where the resume.dat has only 58 Byte, while resume.dat.old is 634 KByte - I guess this is the file containing information about my loaded torrents?

So, what I did next was replacing the resume.dat (58 Byte) with resume.dat.old (634 KB) and hoping that this would solve my problem, but it didn't. Still the same "blank" uTorrent UI.

This is where I got stuck. I don't know what to do to restore my torrents, which I REALLY HOPE is possible. Reloading/adding all those files would be a HUGE pain in the ass, as you can imagine.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[jewelisheaven]

You made it too late if the resume.dat was blank. The fact the OLD is still resized is a good sign. An easy way to check the integrity of the resume.dat is to pick up Ultima's Bencoded File Editor. Read the docs, and the notes in the main post of the thread. Then stick your resume into the B.F.E.

Do you see all your torrents in there? Is there an obvious torrent that's missing? It's sorted by filename so that may not be so obvious.

A quick check to see if the data is still valid would be to remove .FILEGUARD (sub-root) save, then load into uT. If it is renamed resume.dat.bad then you know something is up. Additionally having any error messages in the logger tab is not a good sign.

It's good you decided to backup your settings before messing around too much. It is possible to save the configuration, unless that 600 KiB file is all NULL :

[khyber]

From the BEncode Editor Logger (after loading the 600 KB file):

[23:16:10] [bDecode] Start: "...\resume.dat"

[23:16:10] [ERROR] Failed to decode the file "...\resume.dat"

I guess that's it then ((((

Oh, and when I open the resume.dat (600 KB) with an text editor, there are only some "blank" characters...

So I'll have to add every single torrent file again?

[jewelisheaven]

Yes. There is some good news in this. With having to re-add the torrents you can take advantage of Auto-Loading functionality in uT. If you have torrents saved to different directories what you'll want to do is move the existing torrents OUT of the existing %APPDATA% directory. If you leave them in there and re-add they'll be added again except with .N.torrent as N is the number of times you've added it.

You can then setup the Ctrl-P preferences for the specific folder for each group of torrents. After that, just move the torrents into the auto-load folder, and uT adds them as fast as you like.

I made my tips on backups which I follow for my 4 meg resume.dat since well.. having to add THAT many torrents is a pain.

[gmm6797]

My resume.dat (and old) are staying in my utorrent root folder, is this a problem? I did not configure anything, they just were there on their own.

I have lost my files some dozen times, and I too would like to suggest to the developers some sort of a better solution. How can we contact them, IE put in an enhancement request?

[jewelisheaven]

Which root folder? uT stores resume.dat (the list of torrents) in either the local dir of the exe OR %APPDATA%\uTorrent (with some variation for Vista and its multi-mindedness ><)

If you have lost your settings especially over 3 or 4 times without backing things up.... there's a problem. Regular backups are a safeguard in these instances. uT has no control over Windows crashing or power failure. It is unfortunate that happened to you, but finding the root cause is what I would do first before suggesting any changes to uT. When you get to that point though I would recommend posting in one of the EXISTING threads in the Request forum.

When did you lose your data? After you lost your data the first time after reboot how many times did you open uT before checking to see if the old backup file was still valid? Do you have any .BAD files in your settings directory? Have you ananlyzed them with Ultima's Bencoded File Editor? Or in the event it does not decode a hex/text editor? All corruption I seen is unavoidable by uT as the OS decided to overwrite NULLs.

[khyber]

I'm frustrated.

Today I had to manually reboot f***ing Windows again -.-.

When I opened uTorrent it had no torrents listed, just as a few weeks ago. I was shocked. I immediately backuped the uTorrent application data folder (with the resume.dat in it) when uTorrent was still running and once again when I closed it.

But I wasn't able to open the old resume.dats with the BEncode editor, it just gave me that "Failed to decode the file" error message again. How come? I backuped up all the data

I guess there's no chance of restoring my data? :/

[jewelisheaven]

There are several failure possibilities. 1) make sure your resume.dat.old IS > 1 KiB 2) get yourself a hex editor... there's alot out there. I don't know which one to use actually. 3) since BFE didn't decode it it may mean you have to look yourself at the END of the file to see what's there. If you see alot of what looks like valid data followed by NULL characters (0x00) try removing the NULLs first. Check the end of the file, it should end in 2 or 3 "e" characters. If that still doesn't load into BFE, you may need to add another 'e'.

As far as the manual reboot... was uT frozen? or was it all of windows? Does it seem to happen at the same time of day or after a certain uptime of uT... was it accompanied by any system slowdown.

[khyber]

I managed to restore pretty much everything, thank god I did a backup of the resume.dat like a week ago. Thanks for your answer, your always a great help!

But today I encountered something weird...

I reloaded my profile page on some tracker. There are two indicators which tell you how many active down- and uploads (leeching and seeding) you currently have. I normally should have 33 seeds on this tracker (I remember it, because I often check that tracker's page), but it said I'm only seeding 28. I was confused and checked my uTorrent. I selected the tracker's appropriate category (in uT) to see if anything was wrong. On the first sight everything seemed fine, but after a closer look I noticed some of the torrents weren't in the list anymore, but have been there a few hours ago.

When I looked after the other torrents, I saw that some were missing also. I'm talking about the tasks, not the files, the files are still there. All in all, I "lost" about 5-10 torrents, can that really be possible or am I going crazy?

Well, it's not that of a big deal to readd those torrents, but this could get really annoying if it happens again, which could get me really paranoid

Oh, btw., I'm using 1.8 Beta build 9363.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Ultima]

Are you sure... the backed up resume.dat didn't have 5 torrents less loaded?

[khyber]

The backed up resume.dat had a lot of torrents less loaded, but I restored them and also added some new.

It worked well after that, it had all the torrents loaded -> I had 33 seeding torrents on "that tracker" and everything was fine. At least until a few hours ago when I recognized that some torrents were missing - but these torrents were in the list after I loaded the backed up resume.dat. I'm absolutely sure they were.

[Ultima]

µTorrent doesn't remove torrent jobs automatically, which is what baffles me... Do you know if these 5 torrents disappeared after you restarted µTorrent, or did this happen while µTorrent was running steadily?

[khyber]

As far as I know it happened while uTorrent was running. I'm not sure, but I also think that the uploaded and downloaded amount in the status bar decreased.

EDIT:

Now I encountered something weird:

I recently downloaded a lot of HD content from one tracker, so I checked if those files were also uploaded on other trackers, so I can seed them there also. If I could find the same torrent on multiple trackers this would mean, that, for example, I have three torrents with exactly the same name and the same files seeded.

The funny thing is, that exactly those torrents are missing now. For example, when I had three identical torrents (at least the name and content is identical), only one torrent of these three is still loaded - and it's not the torrent from the tracker I originally snatched it from.

I hope you understand what I mean, I don't know how to say it, my english sucks :X

[jewelisheaven]

:/ Are you sure you're looking at "ALL" in the Category pane (F7) to compare all loaded torrents? IF your back was before this "recent" event the torrents will not be loaded. The displayed name (caption key in resume.dat) is pulled from the torrent file. I'm thinking you have many MY_TORRENT_FILE.#.torrent filenames in your torrent storage folder because of multiple loadings.

I have to agree with Ultima though, torrents don't get removed automatically in any way. :/ So if you could keep track of the loaded torrents by maybe Descending "Added On"... it would keep the most recent ontop.. and if some of those disappear at least you'll be able to tell at a glance when something doesn't look right.

[khyber]

Everytime I restart uTorrent (it's stopped by the scheduler), there are those specific torrents missing on the start. When I add them, then again restart uTorrent, they disappear again. As I said, those torrents have the same caption (and the same files), but different trackers.

What could be the problem?

[jewelisheaven]

If you check in the torrent storage folder, do you see alot of TORRENT_NAME.#.torrent ... Each time uT recognizes the torrent name and a duplicate is added # increments. I've gotten up to 91 before

If this persists through sessions I figure something about those files must be off... can you check their permissions?

[khyber]

Hmm, no, no multiple files in the application data folder... And those .torrents that get automatically removed from the list seem to be missing in the folder - like they never existed o.O

[jewelisheaven]

:/ K then if you really REALLY want to know what's going on... there's Process Monitor from http://sysinternals.com

Here's a tip, when you want to see stuff happening (Ctrl-E toggles events on / off) be sure you added the PID (seen in Task Manager or Process Explorer) to the filters. Otherwise you'll get hit with 10s of thousands of events a minute.

What you'll be looking for are "File Open" "File Close" messages.... note that if you spend alot of time open the Process Monitor can use upwards of 500 MiB of RAM if you let it. Since you're testing the downloads disappearing, I'd start the monitoring prior to adding the torrent (again), seeing it added, do some activity on it like a recheck on your existing data, then stop everything and close uT. Then re-open it... I truly have NO CLUE why this is happening, but with that filter set at least you won't have to go through 10,000 events Also note you can search the events for the specific filename you are looking for.

[khyber]

I think I figured it out now.

The problem was the 1.8 Beta (build 9599). When I added a new torrent with the same file name (TORRENT_NAME.torrent) as a torrent that was already in the list, uTorrent decided to overwrite the old .torrent file with the new one, instead of naming it TORRENT_NAME.1.torrent, TORRENT_NAME.2.torrent, etc.

I tested this with 1.7.7 and everything worked fine.

Is this a known bug in the Beta?

[jewelisheaven]

Well that is very ODD, I just tried that with the openoffice

OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent

OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.1.torrent

To be clear, using process monitor the output when only including the correct PID....

Edit: I was planning to include the log I get to let you compare, however I have to get my system back running from some stupid BSOD ><

Guess what, I too just had to remove BOATLOADS of NULLs. For my 2.315.578 B resume.dat I had to excise the last 152496 extra NULLs and remove back to the last "8:webseedslee" add another "e" and then my dat would load.

I presume this means I lost a bit of data (153115 bytes worth which incidentally is at least 120 torrents' worth, according to a 3 day old backup)... but I don't really care. I'm back up and running

Edit: Did I mention with Ultima's pre-release .6 you can now copy-paste keys. My workaround for this is [ol][li](from backup) remove ALL keys which exist in your "current" resume.dat.[/li][li]While highlighting [ROOT] key, click Item->Export and save to a filename you will remember[/li][li]open/load CURRENT resume.dat ...[/li][li]Item->Add->Type="Raw Bencoded Data"[/li][li]Path to filename you remembered.[/li][li]Say OK. Wait for it to Decode and refresh.[/li][li]Proceed to Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V up a key from the inserted file into the main sub-root tree.[/li][li]Voila[/li][/ol]

Last edited by jewelisheaven (Yesterday 22:17:22)