[time-nuts] How best to exchange Large files?

[David]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:28:34 +0100, ehydra <ehydra at arcor.de> wrote:

>David schrieb:
>> I used Bittorrent last time to do this because of the ease and
>> reliability factor.  There is no resuming since it does not work that
>> way and the whole process was just set and forget.  HTTP and FTP can
>> usually resume aborted transfers as well but require explicit support
>> from both sides and in practice, we had problems with corruption. With
>> a file download service, the problem would have been resuming aborted
>> uploads.
>>
>
>I'm a little confused. Does utorrent can work in a private mode? So I 
>send a magnet link to the consumer and he can connect to my utorrent 
>client? Does utorrent work as a server?

uTorrent and some other bittorrent clients have small trackers built
in that can be enabled and work fine for private transfers.

>Looks to me that there are different torrent protocols? I never 
>investigated it.

They added support for DHT, distributed hash tables, so it is also
possible to share files without any tracker support.

In practice for reliability, I usually added my uTorrent tracker, the
OpenBittorrent tracker, and DHT to the torrents I was sharing so any
client should have worked.

>If it works it looks like the simplest way.

Creating the torrent file to start with was the most complicated part.
You should also make sure you have an incoming IP port through your
NAT and firewall to support incoming connections.

I also usually sent along a PAR2 set or used RAR for end to end error
detection but only because of previous data corruption using HTTP and
FTP with large files.

One other advantage of using bittorrent is that whole directory
structures could be easily shared and the downloader could pick which
parts they wanted.

If some of your downloaders leave their clients running then they can
also upload to other downloaders speeding up the transfers.