Newbie with question on sparse file and download location

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aeo
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Newbie with question on sparse file and download location

Post by aeo »

I am a new user. I am planning to install Deluge 1.2.1. I have apprehension because of my experience with Utorrent last month. Prior to utorrent, I used bittornado. It is stable but it is a resource hog. Also, it is limited in connecting with other types of connections like DHT. I looked around for an alternative to bittorrent client and chose utorrent.

My PC does not have much harddrive space. I think it had maybe 5 gigs free when I downloaded utorrent. I have two external harddrives attached to my pc. Everything was going well for about a week when I started to receive messages from windows that I had little harddrive space left. I always downloaded my files to my external drives when I used bittornado and I instructed utorrent to do the same but somehow my harddrive got filled up. I looked through my C drive to see if files had been downloaded there but I found nothing. After awhile, I got so frustrated that I began to remove programs to free up some harddrive space but that only got me 200 megabytes of free space. Ultimately, i reformatted my harddrive.

I was tempted to go back to bittornado but I decided to look around and found Deluge. I read through the FAQ and some of the postings on the forum. I have two concerns: (1) Does Deluge allow users to choose where to download everytime I click on a torrent? My torrents are on my C drive or desktop. With bittornado, everytime I click on the torrent, it would ask me where I want to download the file. (2) Does Deluge use compact or full allocation of file? Reading through the Deluge's FAQ, I understand that it uses sparse file. I did not quite understand everything but it seemed like sparse file was similar to compact allocation of file. With bittornado, there was no full allocation of file. That is why I could start a download of a 70 gig file on one of my external harddrive even though it only had 55 gigs free.
johnnyg
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Re: Newbie with question on sparse file and download location

Post by johnnyg »

Deluge supports both compact and full allocation and uses sparse files for full allocation.
If you want to be able to selectively download files out of a torrent, you need full allocation.

If you read: http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/Faq# ... wnload.Why
You'll see that Deluge handles this problem by creating those other files.
If I recall correctly, in utorrent the extra parts are put together in a special file which by default lives on the C drive.
This file only gets deleted when you remove the torrent from utorrent.
Not sure if it's possible to use up 5 gigs that way, but it could be a leading factor.

I would recommend using: http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onder ... quoiaview/
to work out what's using up your space, if it is utorrent, then you can ask about it in their forums: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewforum.php?id=3

Of course you are also welcome to try out Deluge.
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