Transmission

Hi all,

I have Ubuntu, with Transmission, and before I started downloading shed loads of Torrents, didn't think of configuring it properly before I jumped straight in. Thing is my torrent files are nowhere to be found (I'm new to torrents and not familiar enough with Ubuntu (or linux) to understand where to look).

Obviously I have all of my files set up so that they download in one place on my ext. HDD, then get put into their final destination on the same disk come the end of the download process. However, my worry is that I've lost the torrent file.

Let me explain my what I need to achieve then maybe you can help. I will shortly be getting a new PC, on which I will need to resume all of my currently downloading torrents as well as continue to serve the existing (downloaded) ones. I am part of a couple of torrent communities and want to be able to continue that when I change computers. Is there any way of seemlessly doing this or will I lose my stuff associated with those accounts?

Many thanks and hope I've explained myself clearly.
Jonathan

Its simple, backup configuration and download directories, check in Preferences to see if you have something else that needs backup (i.e. completion script) and where is it. Use whatever software you like to make the backup.

Where is the configuration? With Transmission-GTK its usually in your user directory, see Configuration Files, backup everything, not just the .torrent files.

Restoring the backup on your new PC means recreating the structure (configuration under your user $HOME, downloads/watchdir anything else on specific directories), which the backup software should do, but remember that Transmission's configuration also records those paths in settings.json, so if the new PC uses a different user, or the external disk is mounted differently, you'll have to adjust it.

Hi rb07, thanks for your advice, any ideas on what I should use for backup software? I'd usually scour the files and just make a copy of them on my HDD. I'm guessing there's probably better ways to do this?

Many thanks again,
Jonathan

I usually do it with tar (a console command), other similar options are zip and rar, but zip doesn't preserve permissions and ownership.

Thanks rb07, I'll read up on how to execute tar (probably very noob'ish of me, but I'm new to it all really!). Do I first place everything I need in a folder then tar it up?

jonthomas83 wrote:Do I first place everything I need in a folder then tar it up?

No, tar can take many files where they are and put them, with the original path, in the backup.

Hi rb07, I've been trying to find some info on doing this with tar, but I'm not a command line user and it's all a bit strange to me. Any chance you could guide me in the right direction? Baring in mind, I need to unpack it on the new computer with another command I guess?

Many thanks again for your time (and patience! )

The manual comes with tar, you just do 'man tar' (and also 'info tar').

Basically you'll use two operations:

Create a backup: Restore from the backup: I'm assuming a recent version of tar, which can handle bzip2 compression, automatically on extraction. Also that you do the operation from the same directory (tar stores the full path except for the leading slash), and you don't need to change owner or permissions on the files (they are restored with the same owner and permissions if you extract as root, and the ownership is changed if you extract as some other user).

You can also use something else, 7zip, rar/unrar, ... whatever you like.

Thanks rb07, very much appreciate your time and advice.