Need to share some large files? Use torrents
Have you ever had a large file(or files) that you need to share with people? Or maybe you need to download a large file but can’t find a reliable download? For all of you in that position, I introduce to you the wonderful world of torrents!
Torrents are small files that, when opened in compatible software, will allow you to download a file(s) from any amount of people. This can lead to fast or slow download times based on how many people are sharing (referred to as ’seeding’) the torrent. If you download a torrent, it is common ettiquete to seed the torrent yourself for at least 150%.
To download a torrent, you need a torrent downloader(kinda redundant, huh?). Some common ones are BitTornado, BitTorrent, uTorrent, Azureus and kTorrent. My personal favorites are uTorrent and kTorrent. They are small and lightweight and they run better than the other ones. Most of these have a version for each Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
A torrent downloader uses the torrent and a torrent tracker to determine where to download what files from. With torrents, you don’t have to worry about stopping your download and losing everything. Its always saved so you can start from whatever point you left off at. You can also throttle your downloads, allowing them full use of your bandwidth or cut it down as low as you want.
My absolute favorite way of downloading torrents is to use TorrentFlux. TorrentFlux runs on a server that has Apache, PHP and MySQL enabled. It creates a web interface for managing and accessing you torrents. Running TorrentFlux allows you to continuously keep torrents downloading, so that you have minimal down time. You can set it up to throttle your downloads, or if you are good enough with whatever OS you have the server running on, you can set it up to stop downloads at certain times of the day and then start them again later.
Now that you have a downloader, you need torrents. My two favorite places to look are The Pirate Bay and YouTorrent. They both seem to have a huge amount of torrents that are relatively well seeded which means you’ll get good download speeds.
Once you find a torrent site you like, you just search around for a torrent that you want or need. You can download the torrent and open it up in whatever program you chose. This should give you a few options for the download (depending on what program you chose) and then your download will begin.
With that, you should be able to find and download (for free!) any software you could ever need. One word of warning though, some torrents are illegal so by downloading them you could be setting yourself up for some trouble in the future. So remember to be careful about what you download.
Have fun!