Greetings. I have found a old drive in warp stone mines. Notably, it contains qBittorrent folder (the one which can be used to restore progress) and already downloaded files-data. I have a running qBittorrent instance and would like to merge statistics and data to contribute even more to the hive-swarm, yes-yes. But there is a problem: those torrents from an ancient drive are associated with different IP that I currently have. Mixing activities on the Internet is a very-very bad practice which I would like to avoid. But the accumulated share ratios are precious to lose. Tried to analyze these so called .fastresume files. Got some interesting information like download time, last_seen_complete, finished_time and such. But all the rest is binary and I cannot read it. So my question is, do these .fastresume files contain any information that can help the adversary to identify me? Should I just import regular .torrent files and skip-reject statistics? Thanks.

  • skavencodecode@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
    31·
    17 days ago

    Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. It’s such a great-great news that fastresume file does not contain anything sensitive. Had the same thoughts about possible profiling, that’s valid strategy. One more question, would not it be possible for the tracker to distinguish a participant based on availability/percentage and timing? If let’s say I have torrent A which is 80.61%. And after some time the same torrent would pop out somewhere with the same percentage?

    • black0ut@pawb.socialEnglish
      7·
      17 days ago

      Both the tracker and the peers in the swarm could see the percentage that you have, as it is announced for coordination with the swarm. It’s just more data that could be used to profile you, yes. On a very common torrent, it probably won’t matter, since more people will have restarted at similar percentages.

      If you’re worried about it, you can restore the torrent, delete the partial content, force recheck on the torrent and redownload it from zero. It will download the whole torrent again, hurting your ratio, but if the content is 20 GiB and you have uploaded 200 GiB on that torrent, you’ll at least keep a positive ratio on the torrent.

      If your torrents are close to 100% but not quite, because you haven’t downloaded the .nfo or .url file, it won’t matter as much. A lot of people also skip those files, so the download % without those files is very common in the swarm. I still recommend downloading those files, as they barely use up any space, and downloading them helps with the torrent’s health.