Recreating downloads.xml or task list

[airoolyu]

Requesting an option to recreate the downloads.xml or task list from the files in C:\Program Files\BitComet\torrents instead of manually add them one by one...

If you're wondering, my task list was deleted recently and the downloads.xml and downloads.xml.bak were empty (BitComet 1.09)

All I have now are the .torrent and .xml files in C:\Program Files\BitComet\torrents

[kluelos]

Files aren't faithfully deleted from that directory. I don't know why or how the algorithm works, but when I look at it, it has many long-completed tasks in it. Doing wha tyou suggest would result in a task list with many bogus entries. It would take longer and be more difficult to weed them out than it would to rebuild the list manually.

When I look at that directory, I find that there are entries in it whose fates I simply don't recall -- did I look at that and decide it wasn't worth keeping? Did I try that software and find I didn't want it for one of many possible reasons? Which one? I'd need to go through it again -- redownload and find out, "oh, yeah, because it was crippleware", or "oh yeah, there were no seeders", a thorough waste of my time repeating experiences I'd already had and decisions I already made. So I made a rule not to rehash, to trust myself that I had a good and sufficient reason to do what I did back then.

A change like this would just force me to relive that. Far better to develop habits that obviate it. Save your torrents to disk, don't open them directly into the client, and then manage the saved tasks.

Now admittedly the client could help a lot here, and it has been requested that BC have the option to move and/or rename completed torrents (which request I renew, by the way, it's one of µtorrent's most attractive features) not to mention moving the torrent content itself upon completion (ditto), but this is a vastly different thing.

I would MUCH rather that the developers spend their time implementing these things (move and/or rename completed .torrents; and optionally move the torrent contents on completion) than on a tasklist rebuilder -- especially an inaccurate one.

[airoolyu]

Sorry if I'm misreading your reply, but that "task list with many bogus entries" is probably the thing I want.

What I'm really looking for is the % completed of every torrent that I opened in BitComet, and I think the .xml files in the torrents folder has that information, I just don't know where to look (and reading all of them one by one would probably kill me anyway). Manually rebuilding the task list wouldn't be much of a problem if I kept all my downloads in the same folder they were downloaded to or if my computer could handle hash checking all of them.

PS. Moving completed .torrents to another folder for archiving sounds like a good idea.

[greywizard]

Sorry if I'm misreading your reply, but that "task list with many bogus entries" is probably the thing I want.

Well, you may want that but as kluelos just explained you above, there are tons of us who wouldn't want hundreds of "undeleted" torrents back in their Task List.

What I'm really looking for is the % completed of every torrent that I opened in BitComet, and I think the .xml files in the torrents folder has that information, I just don't know where to look

You needn't read the .xml files yourself. All you need to do is to re-add the .torrent files you want back to the Task-List, by double-clicking them and after that, making sure that in the properties dialog which pops up you have selected the path to the actual files which were the content of that torrent. After that you may need to perform a Manual Hash-Check (if your client doesn't do that by itself), so that your progress percentage gets back to what it was.

Manually rebuilding the task list wouldn't be much of a problem if I kept all my downloads in the same folder they were downloaded.

What do you mean? If you already have moved the torrents' contents before deleting your Task List, then you already didn't have working torrents for the tasks whose content you have moved. Or perhaps you have deleted the tasks yourself prior to moving the contents.

Therefore your statement doesn't make any sense.

If you want more detailed info on this kind of issues, check this Wiki FAQ topic as well: Tasks have disappeared/deleted tasks reappeared in my tasklist after a BitComet restart. How can I fix this?

Also, if you really want to make sure that you won't have to go through the same ordeal again, in case this happens another time in the future, make sure that you upgrade to a version which is later than v.1.17. Because, starting with v.1.18 BitComet saves up to 7 sequential downloads.xml.bak files, and recovering your Task List is as simple as renaming a valid .bak file to downloads.xml.

[kluelos]

Torrents ARE deleted out of that directory -- I just don't know when -- so that wouldn't really serve your purpose.

The archive subdirectory might, since that does store a copy of every torrent you ever began to download, but it renames them to their hash ID's, so you can't search it by name.

Now, you could search WITHIN those files by name, grepping inside them to find the torrent about some particular thing, but it would likely be an imprecise business with many errors either way. This would help you retrieve one particular torrent.

If you wanted to retrieve them all, or formulate a list, that would probably be programatically possible, though the original .torrent names are lost. Depends on how determined you are to do this, and your level of programming skill, but you could do it in the sense that it's algorithmically possible and practical. You could write a utility to extract the names of the files from within the torrent.

That's about as close as you could come, and you'd have to do some inference. Undoubtedly you'd want to develop this and filter results, so it would be a lengthy effort to tune it. This is the kind of nutty project I used to undertake back when I got paid to undo peoples' mistakes and, occasionally, for myself if I thought it was interesting enough.

No way would BitComet do this, of course.

[airoolyu]

You needn't read the .xml files yourself. All you need to do is to re-add the .torrent files you want back to the Task-List, by double-clicking them and after that, making sure that in the properties dialog which pops up you have selected the path to the actual files which were the content of that torrent. After that you may need to perform a Manual Hash-Check (if your client doesn't do that by itself), so that your progress percentage gets back to what it was.

Like I said, my computer isn't powerful enough to hash check every torrent I have.

What do you mean? If you already have moved the torrents' contents before deleting your Task List, then you already didn't have working torrents for the tasks whose content you have moved. Or perhaps you have deleted the tasks yourself prior to moving the contents.

Therefore your statement doesn't make any sense.

I meant if I knew where the actual content were, manually adding the task back onto the list wouldn't be such a problem. And yes, I've moved all of the torrents' content after they finished downloading/seeding. The torrent might not work anymore, but at least it says 100% on the task list.

If you want more detailed info on this kind of issues, check this Wiki FAQ topic as well: Tasks have disappeared/deleted tasks reappeared in my tasklist after a BitComet restart. How can I fix this?

Step 1 is useless because the downloads.xml and downloads.xml.bak were emptied. I had 1.09 when this happened so step 2 is useless. My only hope is steps 3 or 4, which involves killing my outdated computer with hash checking.

Also, if you really want to make sure that you won't have to go through the same ordeal again, in case this happens another time in the future, make sure that you upgrade to a version which is later than v.1.17. Because, starting with v.1.18 BitComet saves up to 7 sequential downloads.xml.bak files, and recovering your Task List is as simple as renaming a valid .bak file to downloads.xml.

I've updated to 1.21 before making this topic.

Thank you and kluelos for replying.

[greywizard]

Like I said, my computer isn't powerful enough to hash check every torrent I have.

I'm not sure how outdated is your PC, but even on a 800MHz Duron this shouldn't take very long. On my 2GHz laptop with an 5400RPM HDD a hash-check for a 700MB file takes about 30 seconds.

The CPU gets used for the BitComet task at 7-11% with a few peaks at 15%. And this is while running another 73 seeding tasks at the same time.

Without hash-checking it stays around 4%, so hash-checking adds another 4-7% of strain to the CPU.

It's the HDD that's being used intensive during that operation and if you get very slow times during this type of operation maybe it's a good thing to check that your HDD is still in UDMA mode. Windows is known to often reset the HDDs in PIO mode following some HDD errors.

That is unless your PC is really ancient, like a 486 or a Pentium I-II or something and perhaps then it may take a little bit longer. But you only have to do this once, anyway.

I meant if I knew where the actual content were, manually adding the task back onto the list wouldn't be such a problem. And yes, I've moved all of the torrents' content after they finished downloading/seeding. The torrent might not work anymore, but at least it says 100% on the task list.

As I said, if you have finished downloading and seeding for a certain task and you moved the files so long ago that you don't even remember where you put them, there is no reason whatsoever to add it back to the Task List, so I don't see why you would bother to do that.

Why re-add the task to the Task List and re-link it to the content files if you have no intention of seeding that torrent?

The sole reason for keeping a task into the Task List is to download or to seed it. After that you should purge the Task List. It unclutters it and makes loading/exiting BitComet faster (it won't have to write .xml files for so many tasks).

If you really need that torrent later you can always go to the Torrent Archive/History (depending on your client version) and re-add it to the Task List from there.

[airoolyu]

The task list is something like my download history, and it even shows me what I will download in the future, so I want it.

I have torrents that never started or never completed, and I want to find them (finding the uncompleted ones might be easy, but finding the ones that never started is difficult because the uncompleted files were never created.)

Simple yes or no questions:

Does the \torrents\*.xml files have information about the amount of the torrent downloaded? And if yes, is it possible to rebuild downloads.xml with copy-pasting and editing certain things from those .xml?

Edited May 31, 2010 by airoolyu (see edit history)

[greywizard]

Again, finding the files for the torrents that never started it's pointless, since if the task never started then no file was ever created for that task.

The task is just being added to the list, with the creation of the folder/file pending upon starting time. You can set any path for a task that you re-create and which never started.

OTOH if you just started the task for a few moments and after that stopped it, the folder/files might have been created but they're just as irrelevant as if they never were created since they do not contain any valuable data (i.e. no piece was transferred), so you won't be loosing anything by not pointing your newly re-created task to the old files (if they exist).

Once you re-add the torrent to the Task List the files/folders will be re-created again with the same ease in the location you specify.

Therefore your argument doesn't stand.

Partial downloads are another story, but they are easy to spot, if your client had enabled adding the .bc! extension to unfinished downloads.

Yes, the .xml files contain info about the amount of the torrent content which was downloaded. I'm not sure though if it's possible to rebuild a downloads.xml only from individual task .xml files. For instance, downloads.xml contains info about the destination folder for each task, while individual task .xml files don't.

But anyway, to do it manually would be like sorting rice with a pair of boxing gloves on and, as stated above, utterly pointless.

Of course, if you wish to try your hands at it one way or the other, nobody will stop you.

[Lucy26]

I would MUCH rather that the developers spend their time implementing these things (move and/or rename completed .torrents; and optionally move the torrent contents on completion) than on a tasklist rebuilder -- especially an inaccurate one.

These functions are included in the plan of future version development. :)

[airoolyu]

Again, finding the files for the torrents that never started it's pointless, since if the task never started then no file was ever created for that task.

I'm not looking for the files of torrents that never started, I'm looking for the *.torrent that never started. Thank you for answering my questions. In case I didn't mention this before, my main problem was finding the torrents that never started (not the actual content).

[greywizard]

You didn't really mention that explicitly before.

If your .torrent file is not in one of these 3 places: \torrents, \archive, \share then you'll have to go all the nine yards and re-download them from the respective index sites where you found them the first time.

But if you can find them in any of these 3 places, then you can simply re-add them to the Task List.

As pointed out by kluelos once a .torrent file gets copied in the \archive or \share folders they are renamed to their info-hash values.

If not all your desired .torrent files are in the \torrents folder then you'll have to look in the torrent archive or sharing folders, where they also get copied by default.

You should be able to access all the torrents present in your History/Archive and Torrent Sharing folder through the BitComet interface (Torrent Archive/History and Torrent Share categories in the Favorites Panel) where you can also see them by their names instead of hash value.

The hashes are bound to the torrent names through a .xml file which resides in each of the 2 folder. If you can see your torrents in there, then theoretically you should also find your .xml file inside those folders and therefore be able to see the names of the torrents in your Torrent Share and Torrent Archive/History panels.

From there you can easily re-add them to the Task List.

If you can't find your torrents in neither of these 3 places then, as I said, you'll need to get them again from the index sites or whatever source you got them in the first place.