uTorrent: Move All Your Downloaded Files & Keep Seeding

November 02, 2008 by sharky

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.

We shamelessly borrowed this great tutorial from the What.cd Forums, and thanks go out to shuffle for the tip. FSF updated and expanded upon it, with some extra screenshots thrown in for good measure.

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 (which is also found on uTorrent’s forums). 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:

Transmission BT for MAC:

While Transmission for Mac has the "Move Data File" feature; which is great for smaller groups of torrents, you’ll also be able to apply the same technique in a larger sense. Your ~/Library/Application Support/Transmission/Transfers.plist is the equivalent file. However, you’ll need to delete the .resume files and edit the Transfers.plist file. The downside is that the data has to be verified again.

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