Resume Interrupted Downloads with BitTorrent

Resume Interrupted Downloads with BitTorrent

While lots of us are pretty big BitTorrent users, we still use our browser to manage most of our downloads. If your download gets interrupted, though, reader KayDat shows us how you can continue downloading it with BitTorrent.

So you were downloading a file from a server, but the connection was cut/drive was yanked out/PC crashed, and now you're left with a useless half downloaded file? If you can find a torrent of that exact file, you can resume the download, saving you from wasting your time and bandwidth.

Torrents are also a good way to check for file corruption, especially if the file doesn't come with a hash, since torrents themselves have hashes of the file.

Note that with certain browsers that create a .part file (like Firefox), the .part file is the half-downloaded file, not the one with the normal filename. You'll need to delete the regular file and remove the .part extension from the partially downloaded file for BitTorrent to resume downloading it.

While most big files are probably better off downloaded via BitTorrent anyways, this is a pretty clever way to get out of re-downloading the entire file when you forget. Got any other tips for downloading big files? Let us know in the comments.