Suppose you use the transmission-gtk BitTorrent client (v2.94) on a Linux system to seed some files, e.g. Linux distribution ISOs and LibreOffice versions. Suppose that the basic "Save To Location" is: /path1/torrents and the incomplete torrents path is /path1/torrents/incomplete.
Now suppose that you shut down transmission-gtk, and rename /path1 to /path2 (and do not symlink the old path to the new one).
It is simple to change the location for future torrents using the app's configuration dialog, or in $HOME/.config/transmission. However, when one does this, all previously-active torrents are now marked red, with data supposedly missing.
What should one do to correct the locations for existing torrents (complete and incomplete)? And - can this be automated somehow so that it could be done from the command line (e.g. on files in $HOME/.config/transmission/resume)?
2 Answers
Right-click the torrent, click "Set Location" and select the new parent directory (/path2/torrents in this case). You can do this for all torrents at once, if they all were moved to the same directory.
After updating the location, right-click again and select "Verify local data" to let Transmission recheck which files/parts have been already downloaded.
This is automatable from CLI – but first enable the "web UI" feature in Transmission, which also allows you to use transmission-remote.
For each torrent, run transmission-remote --find with the new parent directory.
The files in ~/.config/transmission/resume/ are in the same "Bencode" format as .torrent files themselves, and they could probably be modified using e.g. Perl's Convert::Bencode or very careful sed'ing, but I'm not sure if I would recommend that method.
You'd want to update the "destination" item in the top-level dict:
$ bencode2json < 16a3968b347a81845384394e7f1b38656aeee97a.resume | head { "activity-date": "1619012434", "added-date": "1619011497", "bandwidth-priority": "0", "corrupt": "0", "destination": "/home/xxx/Downloads", "dnd": [ ... (If you go with direct binary editing, note that Bencoded strings are prefixed with their length which needs to be updated as well, e.g. 19:/home/xxx/Downloads in this case.)
An addition to @user1686's great answer: You can update the location of all torrents at once:
- Select "All" and "All" in the to "Show:" bar (so that all torrents are visible).
- Press Ctrl+A to select all visible torrents.
- Right-click any of the selected torrents.
- Select "Set Location".
- Choose "Other".
- Navigate to the new folder for torrents (in your case "/path2/torrents").
- Select "Local data is already there".
- Click "Apply".
- Wait a while for the torrents to be updated.
- When the dialog has disappeared, restart transmission-gtk.
Your torrents should all be recognized as resumeable. You still have to actually resume them though - they're auto-paused if the data couldn't be found.
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