this may be a dumb question but i was reading some articles and trying to understand seeding and peers; i generally pull up a torrent and grab the actual files but uncheck the random txt files like the ones that say where it was downloaded from (just for personal preference to keep my directories clean). does that cause any problems for others? should i not be excluding them from downloading? i generally keep torrents seeding when they're done but if i don't download those small files am i causing problems?

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[–] Tehdastehdas@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Yes, it's a problem when you're the last seeder. Torrents are shared in blocks of data, not files. When a file is missing, the whole block containing it is not sent. If you delete a tiny file before a big video file, the video will be broken for downloaders because the first block contains the tiny file and the video file's beginning with the index with video metadata, without which the video becomes unplayable.

[–] BeliefPropagator@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

this is true if you manually delete the txt file.

however, just unchecking it in the client doesn't result in a broken seeder - at least transmission-gtk 4 will write the "file.txt" even if you didn't check its box, or transmission will create a (sparse) "file.txt.part" file if there's additional pieces to the "file.txt" that you didn't download.

I would expect other clients to behave similarly.

[–] Kissaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A torrent software that breaks your big/video file sharing while calling it complete seems somewhat questionable, not following a good practice, for the reasons you said.

qBittorrent stores the partial file data of deselected files as generic files. Given that only with it the download and a recheck marks the big file complete, without it a recheck considers the big file unfinished (and if partial files are renamed it is despite being complete as a file), I presume it will also send out the block that is partially that file and another to other peers too.

If the other file is fully in the partial block qBittorrent even creates the files despite not having been selected for downloading.

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

ok, i'll start grabbing the descriptive files too thanks!

i think the torrents i'm seeding that have very few seeds besides me are just a couple of movies without extra files so it should be fine for now but i'll take that into mind for the future.