Thread: lost everything in utorrent yikes

Dear fellow ti members, I am looking for your help in troubleshooting the case of missing torrent files.

I have 2 slots on seedboxes and have not been paying attention to my utorrent on my home PC, I occasionally open it up every few days just to see what's active. I had about 80 torrents seeding.



I opened it just now and noticed a very different looking screen. All of my torrents are gone! I don't know what happened can anyone help or walk me through some troubleshooting, I'd like to know who stole them

any help in catching the culprit would be very much appreciated

screen looked like this

Mod Edit: Screen shot removed - unauthorised image host - I sincerely hope that the album name that was posted wasn't a tracker name :O

Have you checked the file system to see if there's any data there? At this point it's far more likely something went wrong on the box rather than an intrusion.

Thanks for the response Ant but may have mislead you, the box was a distraction for me and it's just fine running rutorrent and frankly is irrelevant.

The problem is that all my torrent files are missing from utorrent installed on my home PC which is what I used before the seedbox. It appears that the downloaded files are present in my downloads folder just nothing in utorrent. empty...

Are the files itself still in the download location? If yes, you can just add them again.
Are you sure this is the same client?
Have you done a re-installation of utorrent?
Have you reinstalled your OS?

Did someone else have access to your useraccount in the last few days/weeks, someone who has removed the files from utorrent? (children, wife/husband, friends...)

There is also the probability of an unauthorized remote access, but very unlikely.

You need to provide more info.

EDIT: I guess I'm too late, but it's still correct.

I used to use utorrent in wine a while back, and a couple years ago I used it sometimes in windows, so as far as I know all configuration files are located here:

Windows XP: C:Documents and Settings<username>Application Data\uTorrent

Windows Vista: C:Users<username>AppData\Roaming\uTorrent

I believe what you're looking for is settings.dat. See if it exists, if not then I guess it's gone. Sorry I couldn't help , I just don't use uTorrent.

Also, I'm not a seedbox user at all, but I think leeching from two locations (identical torrents) is a bad thing.

---------- Post added at 07:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:28 PM ----------

*edit

oops, copy and paste job here

Winblows 7: "user">appdata>roaming>utorrent

Yup, the folder that P2P_seeder mentioned : C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent has all the settings files in it ALONG WITH all the torrents that you have added to utorrent since it was installed (unless you chose to delete them by choosing the "remove and delete torrent" option while removing a torrent from utorrent). If you have not chosen the "remove and delete torrent" option then all your torrents should be in that folder. Just sort the folder by file type, and all the torrents will be clumped together, add them all to utorrent (before doing this, disconnect your internet [so the files you DON'T have, don't start downloading]), and utorrent should start checking them all. Then just sort the torrents in utorrent by "status" and all the torrents whose files are missing should show up as "downloading" :) Hope this helps you.

Thanks guys, I did a system restore last night to see if that would work - no joy.

The actual downloaded data is still there in my folder in windows but when I open Utorrent it's blank, no history no files, no transfers nothing uploading/downloading.

No one else uses this PC so no one could've removed them

Windows 7: "user">appdata>roaming>utorrent . Turns out these are hidden files but eventually managed to find them.

so now I have to go through several hundred and open each individually and load them back in. I have lost all the data for downloads like ratio and seedtimes etc, this sucks.

I did some googling and found something from 2009 where someone else had this happen to them too, but couldn't find the cause. I agree that leeching from 2 locations is probably bad and probably cheating, I never do it and not sure I'd know how. I either put them on my box (usually larger packs) or on my home PC for long time seeding depending on the file sizes, tracker and their rules.

If anyone knows why this happened or how to stop it happening again I'd love to know

cheers

No idea man, I have had computer crashes PLENTY of times but NEVER lost my stats and everything, because their is a backup of settings.dat too, that's named settings.dat.old.

But instead of loading every torrent manually, try doing what I said in my previous post. After you disable your internet connection and load all the torrents into utorrent, the ones whose data is still present should start rechecking while those torrents whose data has been deleted will show up as DOWNLOADING. So, sort all the torrents by status and just remove the ones that show their status as DOWNLOADING, and then re-enable your internet. If I'm missing something here, please let me know.

Originally Posted by GOLDIE

I have to go through several hundred and open each individually and load them back in. I have lost all the data for downloads like ratio and seedtimes etc, this sucks.

Yes, the data is lost but that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what the tracker reports. If you uploaded 20GB before your unfortunate data loss the tracker will still reward you for your upload regardless of what uTorrent tells you. No worries, okay?

Originally Posted by GOLDIE

I agree that leeching from 2 locations is probably bad and probably cheating, I never do it and not sure I'd know how.

Like I said earlier, I'm not a seedbox user. But as far as I know, as long as you're loading 'new' torrents into your seedbox (not old torrents that already exist on your home client) you should be good to go.