On Sat Apr 12, 2008 at 08:29:12AM +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
> 
> On 11-Apr-08, at 10:44 PM, Mehul Ved wrote:
> > If the OP can provide the following then it maybe clearer
> > 1) What is he downloading?
> > 2) Does there exist a torrent file for the same somewhere?
> > 3) Does he require the process of how download can be continued after
> > the torrent file has been obtained?
> > 4) If possible, reason for switching over from wget to bittorrent.
> 
> all these questions are irrelevant. Assume he has downloaded 500 mb  
> of a 3 gb iso using wget. It is taking too long. Torrent is  
> available. He doesnt want to waste the 500 mb he has already  
> downloaded. So he wants to download the *remaining* 2.5 gb using  
> torrent. Is it possible?

Yes, I have done it so many times with quite a few distros, especially
happened 3 times with me when ubuntu was just released. Their servers
are hammered so badly that I get pathetic download speeds. So, after
quitting wget, even though the download is partially finished, I got
hold of the torrent of the same release and pointed it to download at
the same location where the partially downloaded file was.

Another couple of times I have used it to generate a clean iso out of
sub-standards CD/DVD's supplied by technology magazines. A minor portion of
data was unreadable but majority of the data was very much readable from
the disc. Thus, rather than throwing away the whole disc as useless one
can create an ISO from it using dd or K3B or whatever your favourite
tool is. Obtained the torrent for the same and pointed it to the iso.
The torrent client checked the iso and discarded pieces that didn't match 
the checksum. Thus, I only needed to download whatever wasn't readable
from the media.

Therefore, my questions are very much valid. From 1 and 2 we can know if
there exists a torrent for the same download. If yes, then he can very
well continue using torrents. Question 3 because no one had described
the process yet, maybe OP knew it can be done but wasn't aware of the
process. Question 4, as it maybe possible like a few others, he maybe
getting better speeds in wget than torrents overall but he may not have
a persistent connection. Thus, his download may have been timing out
frequently. In that scenario it would be better to use wget with -t X
i.e. re-try X number of times, rather than using torrents.

One hitch I had faced in this method once was that even though the
torrent was of the same file, it required me to download it within a
subdirectory which didn't exist in the original download. There I had to
create a subdirectory and move the existing data into the directory and
then continue.

PS: I don't know much above the bittorrent technology as many others
here do but surely I have used this method and it has worked for me.



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