Move All Your Downloads and Keep Seeding with µTorrent

Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2009 8:18 pm

I've seen this question asked before on the forums and I just happened to find this great guide for doing so. For anyone that needs it here it is.

The Scenario:

You finally picked up that dreamy 1 TB hard drive, and the plan is to move all of your seeding µTorrent folders (and torrents) over to their new home. If you want to continue seeding, then technically you don’t need a tutorial such as this; simply stop each of your torrents, right-click, select ‘Advanced’ and choose ‘Set Download Location…’ and then browse to the new location of the directory. This option will work just fine, but if you’re a heavy µTorrent user with a lot of active (seeding) torrents, then this can be excruciatingly tedious. A more practical solution would be to edit just one file to instantly change all of the paths.

How It Works:

First up, we’ll bore you with the details: Shut down µTorrent (to stop all connections). Move your folders to your new location, i.e. a new hard drive.

Now that everything is now moved over, you’ll need to find and edit your µTorrent’s RESUME.DAT file, which is located in your %appdata%\uTorrent directory. To find this, click Start > Run … and enter that line:

To edit RESUME.DAT , you’ll need to download and use BEncode Editor . Unrar it, and run BEncode Editor.exe. Click File > Open … and browse to the uTorrent path from above, and select the file called resume.dat .

TIP: Under normal circumstances, your %appdata%\uTorrent location is a hidden directory; thus you may not be able to browse to resume.dat via BEncode. To get around this, copy resume.dat and ‘paste’ it to a different location, such as to the root of your C:\ drive (before attempting to open it with BEncode). Additionally, it’s a good idea to make a backup of resume.dat, in case something goes wrong.

Assuming that you’ve now successfully opened resume.dat in BEncode, a list of your torrents should now appear:

Next, click on the plus sign ( + ) next to one of the torrents to open up additional information. The key here is the PATH . Look for a line that starts with path , as shown below. This is your working directory for that particular torrent, and likely for all of them (see our "Notes" at the bottom for more info on this).

In the example above, our working directory is shown as C:\uTorrent\ . You probably already knew your path, as you previously moved/copied over all the directories to a new location. It should be assumed that you also know your NEW path, for example " G:\uTorrent\ ", with "G" representing your new hard drive’s assigned location (although this will also work with the same drive letter "C:\**" but with a new path inside it).

Next, in BEncode, click Edit > Replace … and in the first field (Value, enter your current working path. In the second field (Replace, enter your NEW path that you wish to use. Be sure to add a trailing slash ( \ ) to the end of each path. Click " Replace All " to complete.

For our example, all of the torrents that originated with the C:\ uTorrent\ path are now represented by new path - G:\ uTorrent\.

Exit BEncode, and be sure to save the new changes to the resume.dat file. Restart µTorrent, and your torrents should now be seeding from the new drive location. Don’t forget, if you copy/pasted the resume.dat file to a different location prior to editing it in BEncode, you’ll need to overwrite it over the old file in your %appdata%\uTorrent directory (before restarting µTorrent).

Notes:

This tip , as explained in its simplest form, is designed to change all of µTorrent’s downloaded torrent folders, assuming that they’re all in the same source directory (location). For example, if you manually changed the default download path (through µTorrent settings) to a new custom location, it’s feasible that you’ll have working directories in more than one location. Additionally, if you’ve chosen the option to "Save As…" and thus altered the default path when initially starting a new torrent, you’ll need to take this into consideration when editing resume.dat .

If you run into any problems, remove the .fileguard key in resume.dat when editing it with BEncode. Highlight it and click the minus ( — ) sign at the top:

Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2009 8:23 pm

This is a fairly common question actually, so I'm gonna go ahead and sticky it , at least for now.

Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2009 9:06 pm

Good sticky mate people do seem to ask about this allot Wink

Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2009 10:29 pm

Nice one K4n I was actually thinking about this recently. I am purchasing more storage soon and was trying to figure how to keep my seeds going.

Nice one Very Happy

Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2010 12:08 am

Hi

I recently went on a big organizing spree with all of my files and couldn't figure out how to get the seeding going again.

I have since deleted the trackers, so I would need to download trackers again and get it to recognize my files, any suggestions for how to do this? I'm not exactly a guru with torrenting

Also I use kTorrent, not uTorrent

Cheers

Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 12:50 am

Hi,

That was a nice post...
Thanks for the information .....
It really help us to solve that common problem incounter....

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:14 pm

Excellent tutorial, and a worthy sticky.
Just a thought, if you go to Control Panel>Folder Properties you can select show hidden folders and that enables navigation to the Application Data folders without having to use Run to locate the resume.dat. (This works in XP, for other OS look up "hidden folders" in Help)
This method also works fine with Bit Torrent, just have to look in a different folder to find BT's resume.dat file, but with hidden folders shown this is quite easy.
Thanks for a pain free way out of what was a real quandary. Very Happy