Getting Data From Other Seedboxes - Bytesized Hosting Wiki

Getting data from other seedboxes

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A lot of people do change their seedbox provider at some point and would like to keep the data from their old box. Since a lot of people have been asking about how to achieve this, here’s a few tips.

Getting everything you previously had somewhere else can involve a few steps.

Table of Contents

• Data
• RSYNC
• FTP
• SSH/SCP
• Importing the torrents

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Data

First off, you’re going to want to grab all the actual data, the files you want to seed or continue downloading. Theres multiple ways of achiving this.

RSYNC

• Rsync is a powerful tool which can synchronize files across the network (for more info about rsync, type: man rsync into the terminal). To back up files, start rsync on the box where you want your files transferred:

screen rsync -avhzS --progress [email protected]:~/torrents/completed ~/torrents/oldbox

Screen will enable you to put the file transfer in the background and check the status of it from time to time (ctrl A D detaches the screen, screen -rd reattaches the screen). More info about SCREEN.

where ~/torrents/completed is a completed folder which contains the data on your old box, ~/torrents/oldbox will create folder named oldbox in torrents folder on your new box. All files will go into oldbox folder and you can sort them out when the transfer finishes.

Case study:

If you want to put everything you have in old box torrents folder and mirror it to a new box:

screen rsync -avhzS --progress [email protected]:~/torrents/ ~/torrents/

This will put everything from old box completed folder to new box completed folder, from old box downloading folder to new box downloading folder etc.

FTP

• The simplest way to grab all your stuff is with the command-line utility “wget”, the general syntax for this is:

wget --ask-password -r ftp://[email protected]/path

You have to substitute username, password, oldbox.com and path with the ftp details from your other slice. If you use a nonstandard port (e.g. not 21), you can specify it, by appending “:portnumber” to the “host” part, for example: “awesomeboxen.com:2121”. If you don’t know what to put in for “path”, try and leave it blank. Wget also supports resuming downloads, so if you accidently close/kill/stop it while downloading, you can use the commandline parameter “-c” to continue the download. Another usefull parameter is “-b”, this sends wget to the backround, hiding it’s activity, and logging progress to a file. Be careful though, it will run even if you don’t “see” it anywhere, if you forget about it or get the wrong path, it could fill up your slice ;).

SSH/SCP

• You can also copy data to/from the seedboxes via scp, what command you have to execute, depends on which box you are doing it from:

(from old box):

scp -r * [email protected]:~/

(from our box):

scp -r [email protected]:/path/to/whatever .

• You can, of course, substitute the "" in the first command with whatever you like, if you only want to copy a certain folder for example. also, you can substitute the “.” in the second command by something else, if you want to copy stuff to certain folder.

Importing the torrents

Chances are, you probably also want to import the torrents from your old seedbox. Use one of the methods described above to get all the data. Depending on the client you’re using on the other box, and your personal settings, the .torrent files could be anywhere. If you’ve got them, you can just load them all into the torrent program of your choice. Make sure the data you copied over is in a place the torrent program can find it, e.g. ~/torrents/completed for the default setup of deluge. You can also check the ~/.session folder, it should contain all torrents you ever downloaded.

If all else fails you can find torrents on your slice by using the following command: find ~ -name *.torrent

If you want to use black magic you could even try and copying all the state files from deluge.

They are located in two locations.

• A folder called state in ~/.config/deluge/
• Multiple files with state extension also located in ~/.config/deluge

Now there is a large chance the state file has paths to a different disk. You can open ~/.config/deluge/state/torrents.state and edit the correct paths in. (as reported by Giopost)

To recap, different clients keep current seeding .torrent files in different locations:

• Deluge: ~/.config/deluge/state
• rtorrent/rutorrent: ~/.session or ~/.config/rtorrent/session