/preallocate-bt

an utility to preallocate files before downloading

MIT LicenseMIT

README

preallocate-bt is tiny utility for making possible to download torrents directly to slow USB-flash-drives. It correctly (slowly) preallocates files which will be downloaded by Transmission Bittorrent Client (or other compatibility software).

How To Use

  1. Prepare (preallocate) files by invoke the utility. For example:

    ./preallocate-bt -v -- \
        ~/Downloads/'Game of Thrones ALL SEASONS with nice quality.torrent' \
        /path/to/slow/slow/usb/drive/with/my/favorite/films/directory

  2. Open Transmission Bittorrent Client for this .torrent-file and start downloading into that prepared (preallocated) destination.

That's all!

But What The Problem Was Solved At All?

The first thing is exfat filesystem can't do with holes in files. If an application software tries to make a huge hole it becomes to a huge solid write operation (a zero filling procedure).

The second thing is USB-flash-drives could work very badly during active writes (in Linux), especially if it happens not very accurately by an application software.

So it's important for these cases to preallocate downloading files before bittorrent started and do it (preallocation) carefully.

But when you use a bittorrent client for typical situations like downloading into a hard drive or a SSD it useless to invoke this utility (doing any preallocations is useless).