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.
derZONK Says:
awesome !!!
Bix Says:
good Tip, thanks buddy
Ultima Says:
Hi, this is Ultima, creator of BEncode Editor. I appreciate the coverage you’re giving BEncode Editor, but at the same time, I would prefer that you not use direct links to the file. What’s a bad consequence of that practice? The link gets outdated.
Please link directly to the forum announcement thread instead? Thanks.
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=31306
Karolis R. Says:
Hi. the BEncodeEditor from the link given contains A TROJAN!!! Avast found Win32:StartPage-684 [Trj]
allexx54 Says:
Hey this works perfectly! Thanks a bunch.
Gear Says:
Awesome tutorial. The link on the page to the BEncode Editor leads to a non-functional readme which instructs me to tell you to not link directly to the file, but instead to the forum where the download is located.
Seriously though, awesome tutorial. Thanks.
Technotofu Says:
Wow - -saved me a ton of work. Thanks!
lol link is wrong Says:
link to download:
http://sites.google.com/site/ultimasites/bencode-editor#download
darco Says:
Absolutly great HowTo
Thanks
SteveG Says:
Great Guide -
Is there any way to limit this process to completed torrents only?
exxxie Says:
Deluge has a move feature built in, would it be too much to ask that utorrent add this feature soon?
Alexey Says:
Fantastic article, thank you!
Even a fool is now able to move downloaded files to another location.
Grace Matthews Says:
I figured it will be useful to know that if you mess with the download location then uTorrent will have to go through a ‘Re-Check’ procedure for ALL the data, I have over 300 loaded torrents (don’t ask, it’s more like a master list that I pick and choose from as I see fit) and it is going to take some time until it has validated the existance of all that data; just a friendly warning is all since it wasn’t mentioned.
P.S. I got an ‘!’ sign next to my torrents and had to use the Force Re-Check command under the Right-Click Menu.
=^P
Grace Matthews Says:
Oh, also, if you have changed the priority of any of the files within the Torrent BEFORE doing this then they will default back to ‘Normal’ after - not a problem when you know that you want every file in all the loaded Torrents but when you have been forced to load a ‘Season 1-10′ Torrent to find a few random episodes that are corrupt or whatever from a previous download, or that ‘Complete’ Torrent wasn’t quite so complete and another one actually is and you’ve already partially downloaded the first one OR you don’t want all the crap they shove in with a lot of Torrents to promote themselves to make it onto your computer (which you’re not denying them as you have to read it to avoid it & doesn’t bother me, becuase ‘Why shouldn’t they?’) then it becomes a major ball-ache, it is also very time consuming to correct, but then again, I’ve finally corrected uTorrent’s directory structure and it would have bugged me forever otherwise.
- USEFUL TO KNOW IS ALL, PRE-WARNED IS PRE-ARMED.
Glad to be of service.
=^D
Phil Says:
Thanks !
It worked like a charm