Moving Disk/Downloaded files to new Mac: how to reseed

[stefanyoungs]

Transmission 0.93 (3811) Mac OSX 10.4.10 MacBook 2GHz

I have about 40 files downloaded onto an External hard disk, using a MacBook as the downloading machine.

I now want to disconnect this external hard from the MacBook and connect it to another Mac WITHOUT losing the ability to seed the downloaded files.

Is there a guaranteed foolproof way to do this? When I moved a completed file from the internal MacBook disk to the external disk, Transmission showed this file as no longer being complete and started to download it again. I tried downloading the torrent file for the file and dragging this into Transmission, but this did not solve the problem.

I don't want this experience to repeat for all my successful downloads

Please bear with me I am relatively new to torrents.

Stefan Youngs
stefanyoungs@yahoo.com

[techharmony]

Good question. I'd like to know this one as well.

(I can make some guesses, but would rather hear a knowledgeable answer...

Re. moving files to different disk or partition/volume,
I use the Transmission/File/Move Data File To... command. That way, Transmission takes note of the new location and doesn't lose track of it. (If the files are large, it may take a minute or three to finish the move process, during which Transmission seems to beach-ball, but is really just waiting on the OS to complete the file move.)

If you just move files in the Finder means that Transmission no longer knows where it is to send/seed outbound.

So moving files to a new Mac, means that the new Mac Transmission program setup doesn't even know about those complete and seedable files to begin with...

[stefanyoungs]

Thanks for the tip about Move Data File to... I didn't spot that.

It seems Azureus might actually provide a solution, though this is only hearsay for me at present. Apparently it allows one to explicitly associate a torrent file with a particular data file (something I cannot find a mechanism for in Transmission), and if this is so, all one needs do is launch Azureus on the new machine, having attached the external disk containing all the completed data files to the new machine, download the torrent for each data file, point it to the actual data file and presumably, Azureus now understands it has the competed data file in its inventory and can exclaim "Let the seeding commence"

I'd like to be sure this is the case, however, before I risk losing all my upload possibility for my precious data files.

[Harmz]

I may be years past due on this, everyone may already know this, but missing from the answers above is the following.
If you move the folder manually, or remove the folder and still have the original torrent file, opening it and directing the download to occur where the completed file lay, has always done the job for me, unless I did anything to modify the contents of the folder of the finished download. It seems these even fixes some errors of download. It would be nice if under the Management Tab of the Transfers in Preferences there were an option to move completed and/or to label the folder a selected finder folder color.

[stefanyoungs]

As the originator of this question, I'd like to chip in with my experience.

If I simply move a data file to a new location, say a new disk, I take the associated torrent file with it (I am in the habit of keeping torrent files as well as data files for this very reason). I then DELETE the torrent file from Transmission by selecting the entry and hitting the Remove button.

I then drag the torrent file from the new location back into Transmission. Transmission then CHECKS the data file is there, which it is, and when it completes this check, everything is back to where it was. The CHECK involves a pleasant yellow progress bar so your time is not entirely wasted watching it complete.