How To: Seed Private Torrents You’ve Already Downloaded

April 14, 2008 by sharky

This is a great tip to increase your ratio on private trackers. It allows you to seed a torrent through your private BitTorrent account that’s already been downloaded from a public site (or another private one). Thus, only the upload stats will be counted towards your ratio, without incurring any downloading against it.

I’ve seen this tutorial posted elsewhere, but I’ve cleaned it up and redone it as a complete, easy-to-follow walkthrough. Credits go out to all who’ve done it before.

NOTE: This hack is not considered a dirty trick, and it likely won’t lead to you being warned or banned by your private site.

Before You Begin

We use µTorrent as the client in the example, due to its widespread acceptance among private trackers — although just about any BitTorrent program will work in a similar fashion.

IMPORTANT: µTorrent needs to be configured so that new torrents don’t automatically start when added to it. To do this, launch µTorrent and go to OPTIONS > Preferences… and select the ‘Downloads‘ tab. Add a checkmark where it says "Don’t start the torrent automatically", as shown below. Click Apply and OK to save.

1. Find an identical Torrent on both sites

The first thing you’ll need to do find an identical torrent that exists on both sites. Visit your private BitTorrent site, and select a torrent that has a lot of leechers (as represented in the "L" column). Typically this would be a recent addition to the site, and new movie releases and TV episodes work great for finding the ‘public mirror’ of the torrent. Before settling for a particular torrent, visit a public tracker (such as isohunt, mininova or thepiratebay) and search for the same torrent. Obviously, the trick is to be sure it’s available on both sites; and in particular, you’re looking for the exact same torrent name (complete with identical release group name and tags). Keep an eye on the size of both torrents - it’s important to choose similar release sizes (when the tags are identical from each), although not necessary. TIP: Usually the most popular release (in terms of high seeds/leechers) on a public site will be the ’same’ release as found on a private site.

Shown below are two identical torrents - the first one is found on mininova.org and the other from a private website. Note the similar titles and sizes of each:

NOTE: At this stage, you don’t want to ‘open’ the private torrent, although it’s OK to save the actual *.torrent file to your hard drive. The importance is that you’ve "found" both torrents.

2. Download (and complete) the Public Torrent

Now that you’ve found two identical torrents, download the torrent from the public site, start it manually (by clicking the green arrow) and wait for it to finish in µTorrent. Once it’s turned into a seed (100%), delete the torrent by right-clicking it and select REMOVE (or Remove And > Delete .torrent). Do NOT delete the ‘Data’.

3. Download and Open the Private Torrent

Go back to your private site and download the matching torrent, and open it in µTorrent. If you’ve properly changed µTorrent’s settings, the torrent will not automatically start - this is good - and it should display 0.0% in the ‘Done’ column. Next, right click on the torrent, and select Advanced > Set Download Location… - and browse to the completed folder (typically this folder is located in "My Documents > Downloads\" or "C:\Program Files\utorrent\downloads\"). Once found, select "OK" to finish.

Last step: Again, right-click the torrent and this time select "Force Re-Check". The torrent should now begin to update. You can now start the torrent by clicking the green arrow.

NOTE: It’s likely that the torrent will stop at 99% (or similar) at the end of the "Re-Check". This is normal - the remaining portion will be downloaded when the torrent is started.

A Few Tips…

TIP: Work quickly. Public sites are slow to download, due to the high number of leechers. So it’s important to complete the "public" torrent as quickly as possible and begin the process of getting into the swarm on the private site. For this, I’d even suggest that TV torrents might work best for this because they’re smaller (~350MB) than most movies (~700MB), and are generally more popular.

TIP: As opposed to using a public site as the source, this works well for seeding between two private sites, as well. Here’s the scenario: Download and complete the torrent from one of your private accounts that already has a good ratio and is easy to seed (upload) to. Seed the torrent to one of your more elite private accounts that’s more difficult to maintain a decent ratio. I recommend ‘private to private’ because the download speeds with a private site will be much quicker than with a public one, thus you’ll complete the torrent much faster and be able to get into the upload ’swarm’ earlier on the site that you wish to seed to.

TIP: You can also seed the same data to any number of private sites simultaneously. Simply repeat Step 3 for as many different private sites as you wish, and point each to the same completed folder.

NOTE: You do not need to manually add the ‘tracker URL’ in the private torrent. If you downloaded it through your account, the tracker will automatically update with your passkey.

Archived by FSFmirror