Partial seeding

[hdsl29]

Hi all

Sorry if this is a basic question.

I'm seeding and downloading torrents in uTorrent. Lots of the downloaded files are enormous (many Gb), and I don't in fact want to download the lot, but only certain episodes.

My question is whether you can download part of a torrent and still seed it. This is important as I don't want to be a leecher.

I've tried it, and it seems to work: with only e.g. 2 out of 50 files in a torrent downloaded, I can still seed. What's happening (I guess) is that I'm helping out any peers who ask for pieces of those 2 files, and ignoring peers who ask for anything else.

But I have "pre-allocate files" ticked - I did this mainly to prevent fragmentation on my disk. So, with an example torrent containing 50 large files, all the files exist in the file system, but only 2 of them are actually valid files - because I set all the others to "don't download".

If I untick "pre-allocate files", to prevent all these junk files from appearing in my file-system, will I still be able to seed from a partial download? Or will uTorrent throw errors at me constantly, when a peer asks for a file that I don't have?

thanks for any information!

[WLS]

You will only seed the parts you download. Not the complete torrent.

[hdsl29]

Thanks WLS. I understand that, of course I can only seed what I actually have.

What I'm wondering is whether this happens smoothly, without uTorrent complaining with an error because some files are missing. This isn't happening at the moment - I'm getting no errors - but I'm not sure if this isn't just because, due to file pre-allocation, all the files in the torrent at least appear to be present (though 95% of them can't be seeded because the content isn't there).