Sorry if this is a rookie question, but most of what I’ve downloaded over the last decade was nowhere near this obscure. I’d like to think this community could benefit from a corpus of Q and A, if this breaks rule 4, I’ll gracefully accept if this post is removed.
I am downloading through Mullvad, which I know doesn’t let you forward your ports. So I can appreciate that that seeder’s settings and mine might not be super compatible.
Is there any flag or anything I can do to let the seeder connect at all, besides finding some other way to exit with port forwarding. Seedbox is on my horizon, but it is far out there.
Are there any other peers in that torrent swarm? If it’s just you (leeching peer) and the lone seed (seeding peer), and neither of you have ports open, then you won’t be able to download any torrent data.
If there is another peer in that swarm, or another peer joins later, and that new peer happens to be fully connectable (port forwarded) then you’ll be able to download the torrent data through them. If this is your situation then all you can do is try your luck and wait for another peer to come by.
Or if we rule all of that out - it’s possible that lone peer just has a very busy torrent client. They could be the lone peer on tons of other torrents so it would take quite a while before their torrent client gets around to sending you torrent data. If this is the case then it’s the same as above, just have to continue waiting.
So, there are other peers, some of which gave me all of the data that I have so far, a small number of them. They can connect just fine to me, so their ports are open.
There are other peers with only a small percentage of the total torrent that are permanently connected, which might mean that they only wanted to download some of the files, but looking at the file list availability when they were the only connected peers, they had scattered chunks of data and not one continuous folder.
Now the convoluted part that I feel needs its own post:
In my quest to get the data, I’ve done some digging on BTdig, and added a few torrents with what seemed to be almost identical content. Most of these were completely inactive, but it seems like my client figured out that there’s overlap with this torrent, somehow. It now shows one of these inactive torrents as having a small % completion, despite also showing that 0 bytes were downloaded. I suspect it was able to match some of the data.
I wish I better understood that part of torrenting, a lot of what I want is relatively obscure and I love nothing more than seeding files that took months to complete. Being able to stitch together torrents and make rarities a bit less rare is exactly what I want to do.