Real gen z "I don't understand computers but I know all the words" vibes here.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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Keep it private by encrypting it.
But torrenting isn’t an appropriate tool, as it’s designed for one -> many distribution.
Are you wanting go transfer gigabytes of photos and documents from one computer to another, or back the stuff up to offsite storage?
Why? Just copy the data out of the laptop. A torrent only make sense to let lots of people download it, not for 1:1 data transfer that would be massively inefficient and would have zero advantages.
As for making it private, just don't share with anybody and only seed it yourself. But of course nobody would ever download it, except yourself if you manually copy the torrent to another machine and leech it yourself.
Torrents are about distributing data.
That answers your question.
Where are you sending it though?
Right? This is the silliest use of a torrent. If you want to transfer the data, just pull the drive out physically and plug it into a different device
I think they think it’s the cloud
that could be it
That's not how torrents work, you would be better off buying an ssd.
Making the torrent private essentially makes it impossible for others to download/seed no? I don’t think this would be a reliable method.
As others have said, torrents won't work as a backup. This is because when you create a torrent, it isnt uploaded to a server somewhere, other users download directly from you. So if you have it as a torrent, until someone else downloads it, you only have 1 copy.
If you want to use it to upload stuff from your laptop to another PC, then this would actually work, and the only thing needed to avoid it being public is to not share the torrent file itself publically. But there are better tools for this, such as SyncThing. Torrents will work once, but any changes to the files will break the torrent.
You are not uploading, others are downloading. The direction of traffic is the same, but the incentive is different.
Before torrents, there were services where you just announced "there are all my files just download what you want" and some places had quotas on how much you should make available for download. People were sharing all kinds of random trash and also downloading that trash.
A joke was -- was it on like bash.org? -- that you have some file you want to backup, you have to make people want to download it, so you just call it leaked_celebz_nudez.zip or something and it would be downloaded forever, even if it did not work because so much trash was shared and if could help your quota.
So you'd have to use the strategy in that joke. Make a torrent of your stuff, just encrypted so it is trash for anyone who wants to download it, but you'd have to make the torrent content so imcredibly desireble that even if the comments and ratinfs of the torrents goes to shit, people will still be downloading it in the hope it works. What would be that desireable though, I do not know.
Depending on what you define as "massive"...
The networked storage services: Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive offer free storage on virtual hard drives after you install their respective programs.
The amount that's free is limited: OneDrive 5GB, Dropbox 2GB, Google Drive is weird 15GB across all of Gmail, Photos, Drive, and device backup. You can see your Google storage here https://one.google.com/storage
Some of the photo backups I stored on Google Drive were corrupted over time. Lucky I had other backups. No issues anywhere else, only Google corrupted files. I will never trust their storage again.
Depends on your skill level, but I always found rsync the best tool for transferring between two systems, regardless of distance.
Definitely just don’t forget if you need a trailing / or not lol