Vuze Forums

How dose file re checking work? I use different locations for finished torrents and unfinished torrents, when I have to reload or change my OS due to windose eating its brains like the zombie it is it can drive me nuts to try and get things back to how they were before.

It dose not seem to check both locations , it seems to favor the move to directory more than the temp or vice versa. Is there any way to have it check multiple locations and organize what’s there?

This happened a few times when I used UTorrent 2.2.x, mainly had bad hard drive had to move stuff around a few times over the years and since file dates changed I could not easily grab relevant torrent and toss im in the client to re sync my downloads and uploads but since they are in separate locations it was a slog getting it all worked out, it’s bad when you are trying to finish dozens of yearlong downloads, ect.


I guess the best way to do it is just move the data files manually and not automate moving to a different folder, move the data files then delete it from vuze since I am bad about not keeping things tidy (I use Qbitorrent for seeding since I don’t seed many things since my bandwidth is caped at 70kbps). Tho that presented an issue as Vuze constantly pops up while moving stuff, nothing like playing dark souls 2 and losing control when vuze popping up telling you its moving files..

Hoo-boy. Well, there's kind of a lot going on here. Let's see if we can't pick through it...

(05-26-2017, 12:45 AM)'ZippyDSMlee' Wrote: [ -> ]How dose file re checking work? I use different locations for finished torrents and unfinished torrents, when I have to reload or change my OS due to windose eating its brains like the zombie it is it can drive me nuts to try and get things back to how they were before.
 

"Re-Check Files" scans the location on disk where the files are supposed to be. It doesn't make sense for it to look at any other location.

Every torrent in Vuze (actually, every file inside every torrent in Vuze) is configured with a disk path where it's saved, and Vuze knows that location for each and every one. Whenever Vuze moves a file, the configured location is updated so that Vuze expects to find the file at its new location, and that's naturally where it will look for it in the future.

Quote:It dose not seem to check both locations , it seems to favor the move to directory more than the temp or vice versa. Is there any way to have it check multiple locations and organize what’s there?

No, definitely not. You have to understand, "Re-Check Files" is a process for scanning the download "cache" of a torrent, in the form of the destination path/files on disk, in order to determine which pieces of those files it does and doesn't have. The files it will look at are the ones it's configured to be downloading into, as that's where all of the pieces are expected to be.

Things like "move-to directory", "temp directory", those are your concepts of those locations, but to Vuze they don't mean anything. The only thing it cares about is the Save Path that's set for the torrent. It starts out set to a subdirectory of your "temp directory", if that's how you have it configured, and then if you have completion-moving set up, the Save Path is updated when the files are moved. But there is only ever one location where they're supposed to be, and that's the location that's scanned to determine which pieces already exist and which need to be downloaded.

Now, if a torrent contains some files that you already have downloaded somewhere else, you can have Vuze scan those files and match them up with the torrent using the "Search For Existing Files..." feature, though there's a bug you should watch out for. If there are any matches, Vuze will set the Save Path for those files to the location where they're found, and it will expect to find them in that location whenever it needs to do a re-check.

But understand that this only works for existing completed files (in incomplete torrents), where you already have 100% of the individual file's content. It can't match up partially-complete files scattered all over your hard drive, because... well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's nearly impossible to definitively recognize an incomplete file as a member of the torrent. It could be a different file from a different torrent that just happens to look like the one you need. That's why Vuze relies on the Save Path to tell it which files any incomplete pieces of the torrent are located in.

Quote:This happened a few times when I used UTorrent 2.2.x, mainly had bad hard drive had to move stuff around a few times over the years and since file dates changed I could not easily grab relevant torrent and toss im in the client to re sync my downloads and uploads but since they are in separate locations it was a slog getting it all worked out, it’s bad when you are trying to finish dozens of yearlong downloads, ect.

I can't speak for uTorrent, but Vuze doesn't care about file dates. Heck, when using "Search For Existing Files..." it doesn't even care about the file names, it can and will match up files from the torrent even if they've been renamed. (Which is great if you've got a "megatorrent" which contains the same files as other torrents you've previously downloaded, but doesn't use the same filenames. It'll still identify them as being part of the torrent's contents without having to go through and rename all the files.)

Quote:I guess the best way to do it is just move the data files manually and not automate moving to a different folder, move the data files then delete it from vuze since I am bad about not keeping things tidy (I use Qbitorrent for seeding since I don’t seed many things since my bandwidth is caped at 70kbps). Tho that presented an issue as Vuze constantly pops up while moving stuff, nothing like playing dark souls 2 and losing control when vuze popping up telling you its moving files..

From a torrent-management perspective, the worst thing you can do is move files around manually, outside of Vuze's control. In fact, that's the #1 source of most problems people have related to torrent file management. The #2 source is letting Vuze and other BitTorrent clients operate on the same files, so your mention of Qbittorrent worries me a bit. If you need to pass files off to another client for whatever reason, that's fine, but they must be deleted from Vuze's library, or you're going to encounter issues. But if you're going to be moving files around, while they're under Vuze's control, you're much better off having it move them itself, so that everything can be kept in sync with the torrent data.

As far as Vuze's automated file-moving interrupting you, though... whatever's causing that, you should be able to turn it off. Unless you're just talking about the computer being slowed down by the file-move process, because that can certainly happen if the files are big and it's an inopportune time. But in terms of actually displaying any messages / interrupting other things you're doing on the computer, that can definitely be turned off and it's not strictly related to the moving of the files per se.

When you manually tell Vuze to move files, yes it pops up the "Please wait while files are moved..." message and locks you out of the interface until it finishes, but automated moving is different. I can say with absolute certainty that completion moving can be a completely silent background operation, because that's how I have it set up. Torrents come in off an RSS feed, they're automatically tagged and downloaded on a scratch disk, and when they finish they're automatically moved to a permanent storage location — Vuze does all of that silently without giving any indication it's happening. Unless I happen to spot them in "My Downloads" while they're transferring, I don't even notice those torrents being processed until I look in the storage directory and see new files waiting for me.

So, if Vuze is popping up messages and interrupting you while you're doing other things, I'd recommend that you check your settings and turn off whatever messages may be interrupting you. Interface > Alerts is the first place I'd check, personally I have everything unchecked there except "Disable sliding animation...". But there's also the "Suppress File Download popup dialog" in Interface > Display, I have that checked as well. But whatever interruptions you're seeing should happen with or without completion-moving turned on, though it's possible that when it's turned off they're brief enough not to notice.

(06-28-2017, 11:29 AM)'FeRDNYC' Wrote: [ -> ]Hoo-boy. Well, there's kind of a lot going on here. Let's see if we can't pick through it...

(05-26-2017, 12:45 AM)'ZippyDSMlee' Wrote: [ -> ]How dose file re checking work? I use different locations for finished torrents and unfinished torrents, when I have to reload or change my OS due to windose eating its brains like the zombie it is it can drive me nuts to try and get things back to how they were before.

 

"Re-Check Files" scans the location on disk where the files are supposed to be. It doesn't make sense for it to look at any other location.

Every torrent in Vuze (actually, every file inside every torrent in Vuze) is configured with a disk path where it's saved, and Vuze knows that location for each and every one. Whenever Vuze moves a file, the configured location is updated so that Vuze expects to find the file at its new location, and that's naturally where it will look for it in the future.

Quote:It dose not seem to check both locations , it seems to favor the move to directory more than the temp or vice versa. Is there any way to have it check multiple locations and organize what’s there?

No, definitely not. You have to understand, "Re-Check Files" is a process for scanning the download "cache" of a torrent, in the form of the destination path/files on disk, in order to determine which pieces of those files it does and doesn't have. The files it will look at are the ones it's configured to be downloading into, as that's where all of the pieces are expected to be.

Things like "move-to directory", "temp directory", those are your concepts of those locations, but to Vuze they don't mean anything. The only thing it cares about is the Save Path that's set for the torrent. It starts out set to a subdirectory of your "temp directory", if that's how you have it configured, and then if you have completion-moving set up, the Save Path is updated when the files are moved. But there is only ever one location where they're supposed to be, and that's the location that's scanned to determine which pieces already exist and which need to be downloaded.

Now, if a torrent contains some files that you already have downloaded somewhere else, you can have Vuze scan those files and match them up with the torrent using the "Search For Existing Files..." feature, though there's a bug you should watch out for. If there are any matches, Vuze will set the Save Path for those files to the location where they're found, and it will expect to find them in that location whenever it needs to do a re-check.

But understand that this only works for existing completed files (in incomplete torrents), where you already have 100% of the individual file's content. It can't match up partially-complete files scattered all over your hard drive, because... well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's nearly impossible to definitively recognize an incomplete file as a member of the torrent. It could be a different file from a different torrent that just happens to look like the one you need. That's why Vuze relies on the Save Path to tell it which files any incomplete pieces of the torrent are located in.

Quote:This happened a few times when I used UTorrent 2.2.x, mainly had bad hard drive had to move stuff around a few times over the years and since file dates changed I could not easily grab relevant torrent and toss im in the client to re sync my downloads and uploads but since they are in separate locations it was a slog getting it all worked out, it’s bad when you are trying to finish dozens of yearlong downloads, ect.

I can't speak for uTorrent, but Vuze doesn't care about file dates. Heck, when using "Search For Existing Files..." it doesn't even care about the file names, it can and will match up files from the torrent even if they've been renamed. (Which is great if you've got a "megatorrent" which contains the same files as other torrents you've previously downloaded, but doesn't use the same filenames. It'll still identify them as being part of the torrent's contents without having to go through and rename all the files.)

Quote:I guess the best way to do it is just move the data files manually and not automate moving to a different folder, move the data files then delete it from vuze since I am bad about not keeping things tidy (I use Qbitorrent for seeding since I don’t seed many things since my bandwidth is caped at 70kbps). Tho that presented an issue as Vuze constantly pops up while moving stuff, nothing like playing dark souls 2 and losing control when vuze popping up telling you its moving files..

From a torrent-management perspective, the worst thing you can do is move files around manually, outside of Vuze's control. In fact, that's the #1 source of most problems people have related to torrent file management. The #2 source is letting Vuze and other BitTorrent clients operate on the same files, so your mention of Qbittorrent worries me a bit. If you need to pass files off to another client for whatever reason, that's fine, but they must be deleted from Vuze's library, or you're going to encounter issues. But if you're going to be moving files around, while they're under Vuze's control, you're much better off having it move them itself, so that everything can be kept in sync with the torrent data.

As far as Vuze's automated file-moving interrupting you, though... whatever's causing that, you should be able to turn it off. Unless you're just talking about the computer being slowed down by the file-move process, because that can certainly happen if the files are big and it's an inopportune time. But in terms of actually displaying any messages / interrupting other things you're doing on the computer, that can definitely be turned off and it's not strictly related to the moving of the files per se.

When you manually tell Vuze to move files, yes it pops up the "Please wait while files are moved..." message and locks you out of the interface until it finishes, but automated moving is different. I can say with absolute certainty that completion moving can be a completely silent background operation, because that's how I have it set up. Torrents come in off an RSS feed, they're automatically tagged and downloaded on a scratch disk, and when they finish they're automatically moved to a permanent storage location — Vuze does all of that silently without giving any indication it's happening. Unless I happen to spot them in "My Downloads" while they're transferring, I don't even notice those torrents being processed until I look in the storage directory and see new files waiting for me.

So, if Vuze is popping up messages and interrupting you while you're doing other things, I'd recommend that you check your settings and turn off whatever messages may be interrupting you. Interface > Alerts is the first place I'd check, personally I have everything unchecked there except "Disable sliding animation...". But there's also the "Suppress File Download popup dialog" in Interface > Display, I have that checked as well. But whatever interruptions you're seeing should happen with or without completion-moving turned on, though it's possible that when it's turned off they're brief enough not to notice.

 

File dates only come in handy when you have to restore the OS or just have to reinstall the torrent program fresh and restart all the torrents without restarting the data, so if they are staggered in last time modified list you can drag and drop them more easily.


There is no option I can find to disable the “bring vuze to front window” or  “file move completed “ notification.


I dunno would it not be smart of the devs to just program it to scan all locations inputted and not just the single default cache? If you are highly organized have everything in separate folders a single folder is not going to help you any. Everything I have moved is moved by Vuze unless it’s a few torrents I am trying to restore since I have a few left over from UTorrent, even with the data in the right cache folder it does not always find it, just saying an option to scan input inputted folders plus cache folder then on completion move to completed folder deleting any extras in the process, boil it down its 2 check boxes and a line for folder locations. Can a plugin do a data check and move files then update their locations in vuze?

(06-28-2017, 11:29 AM)'FeRDNYC' Wrote: [ -> ]Now, if a torrent contains some files that you already have downloaded somewhere else, you can have Vuze scan those files and match them up with the torrent using the "Search For Existing Files..." feature, though there's a bug you should watch out for. If there are any matches, Vuze will set the Save Path for those files to the location where they're found, and it will expect to find them in that location whenever it needs to do a re-check.

But understand that this only works for existing completed files (in incomplete torrents), where you already have 100% of the individual file's content. It can't match up partially-complete files scattered all over your hard drive, because... well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's nearly impossible to definitively recognize an incomplete file as a member of the torrent. It could be a different file from a different torrent that just happens to look like the one you need. That's why Vuze relies on the Save Path to tell it which files any incomplete pieces of the torrent are located in.
 

Well, it appears I may be wrong about that second part. The discussion of that feature over at vote.vuze.com includes some references to files containing various percentages of their complete data, and how those are handled. So it seems it may be possible to match even incomplete files with the torrent's contents. I'm... a bit afraid to even contemplate how that would work, for the same reasons why i thought it wouldn't work, but it means that "Search For Existing Files..." may be able to solve more of your poblems than I'd realized. In light of that, it's definitely better that the process be a manual operation that the user triggers, rather than something done automatically for every torrent, as that could easily lead to data loss.

(06-28-2017, 12:18 PM)'ZippyDSMlee' Wrote: [ -> ]File dates only come in handy when you have to restore the OS or just have to reinstall the torrent program fresh and restart all the torrents without restarting the data, so if they are staggered in last time modified list you can drag and drop them more easily.
 

OK, yeah, I can definitely see that, for manual file-management timestamps can be a big help in determining what's what. I definitely keep my torrent directories sorted by (decreasing) modification date in the file browser, so that the newest stuff is always right at the top. Vuze makes a point of ignoring them, though, because as you say dates can change and it has much more reliable methods of identifying and organizing file data.

Quote:There is no option I can find to disable the “bring vuze to front window” or  “file move completed “ notification.

Really? I checked and all of the Interface > Alerts settings are even visible in Beginner settings mode, so they should be visible for you. I'd check (well, un-check, if they are checked) the Popups section options "Popup an alert when a file is finished" and "Popup an alert when a download is finished".

If you're not running the latest release version (5.7.5.0, you can see what version you have installed by chosing Help > About Vuze, the title of the window that comes up will be "About <version number>") then you should update Vuze. The list of things that can be configured in Interface > Alerts has definitely grown over time.

In the version I'm running, there's another option, "Reduce situations where the main window is automatically shown" — you could try turning that on and see if it cuts down on the interruptions. I'm not exactly sure how recently that setting was added to Vuze, though. If you're running the latest Vuze and it's not there it may be a beta feature. If you're willing to help test it out, it you could install the beta version and see if that makes any difference. (The Help menu in recent release versions contains an entry to "Join Beta program...", which will update you to the latest 5.7.5.1_B10 beta version.)

Oh, one last possibility, the latest Vuze (5.7.5.0) added a setting to "Post message to notifications" for certain types of tags, to be shown either "on Addition" or "on Removal". If you've tried everything else and still having issues with Vuze interrupting other tasks, you could go into Tags Overview and make sure that none of your tags have any notifications switched on. The options is waay down at the bottom of the Settings view. Mostly this applies to Manual tags, not automatic Download State tags which don't allow notifications to be set. So if you don't have any manual tags configured it's unlikely to be an issue. However, there are a few Category tags like "All" and "Uncategorized", as well as automatically-created Manual tags like "Untagged", that do allow notifications to be set.

Quote:I dunno would it not be smart of the devs to just program it to scan all locations inputted and not just the single default cache? If you are highly organized have everything in separate folders a single folder is not going to help you any. Everything I have moved is moved by Vuze unless it’s a few torrents I am trying to restore since I have a few left over from UTorrent, even with the data in the right cache folder it does not always find it, just saying an option to scan input inputted folders plus cache folder then on completion move to completed folder deleting any extras in the process, boil it down its 2 check boxes and a line for folder locations. Can a plugin do a data check and move files then update their locations in vuze?

Well, nearly anything is possible through a plugin, so I'd assume one could be written to do what it sounds like you're asking. And I certainly don't speak for the Vuze developers — I'm just Some Guy (who's been using Vuze extensively for over 10 years), and my opinion is just that. But regarding "would it not be smart of the devs...", my opinion is that, no, it's actually very smart of them not to do that.

Let me go off on a bit of a tangent a to tell you the #TrueStory of my friend, who shall remain nameless because I'm too much of a pussy to call him out by name (though it'd be well-deserved), who we'll just refer to as The Disorganized Photographer or "Dis" for short. Dis liked to use Picasa to sort through and display the photos on his computer, imported from the memory cards in his various digital cameras. But Dis absolutely refused to be forced to organize the photos on his computer, and wanted to be able to dump them absolutely anywhere... and still have them show up in Picasa. So, he made sure Picasa was configured to scan the entire contents of EVERY SINGLE DRIVE on his system. Its scanning locations were literally configured as "C:\ ; F:\ ; G:\ ; H:\ ; N:\ ; O:\ ; R:\". (Yes, he really had 7 or more hard drives installed in the machine, each one tens/hundred of gigabytes, then eventually multiple terabytes, all of them packed to the gills with all manner of files (often multiple copies of the same files in different places), scattered randomly around in folders with informative names like "old hard drive" and "card dump" and "Desktop" and "New Folder (37)". ...Again, none of this is a joke. In fact I once found a folder on his desktop that was called "Desktop", containing another folder called "Desktop"! There were digital camera photos inside C:\Users\Dis\Desktop\Desktop\Desktop\, because of course there were.)

No matter how hard I tried, I could never impress upon Dis that the reason why Picasa ran incredibly slow on his machine, took days (literally DAYS) to scan for photos, often would fail to notice new ones until he forced it to do a full rescan (again, DAYS), and basically just worked very poorly in general (something he complained about loudly and often!), was entirely his fault. He was sabotaging it with his insane configuration, and forcing it to work in a way it's not meant to, wasn't designed to handle, and would never NOT cause huge problems. Picasa's databases would grow to hundreds of megabytes in size (data which all has to load each time it's run, and which has to be updated whenever photos are discovered or edited), and those monstrous databases were mostly stuffed with useless data it had to collect just so it could keep track of the files it doesn't need to manage. Because not only does Picasa have to store data about all of the photos it's managing, but when it scans locations like C:\Windows\ and C:\Applications\ — to say nothing of C:\Users\Dis\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\whatever\cache2\ and the like — it stores information about every single non-image file it finds, to record the fact that those files don't contain image data and don't need to be re-examined in the future. Same thing when you have it scanning folders full of hundreds of gigabytes of MP3 music and MP4 video files just because there might happen to be a few photos scattered in there with them.

File-scanning is an intensive process, far more intensive in a bittorrent client than in a photo manager. If you ever need to be convinced of that, just use "Search For Existing Files..." and watch how long it takes just to scan a single folder, even when the files there are part of the torrent. Or, hell, just run a "Force Re-Check" on a big torrent. I have a slightly older machine with slow-ish hard drives, admittedly, but if Vuze has to re-check a huge 20- or 30-Gig torrent containing many thousands of files, it's gonna take several minutes before it gets to "Checking: 100%". And that's just to scan one single location when the files are all there!

Because scanning is so intensive, Vuze contains a lot of code with the sole purpose of avoiding it as much as possible, even for the files it does have to deal with. It protects the same file from being part of multiple torrents (unless the user is crazy enough to switch that protection off), minimizing the chances of file corruption or contention which causes re-checking. It has Fast Resume mode which constantly records current activity, so if Vuze crashes, when it starts up again it can re-check only the pieces that were in use before the crash. It can be set up to keep configuration backups (even on a separate disk, for maximum protection), so that if the software or the OS does have to be reinstalled, the previous configuration can be restored and everything can be picked up right where it was before.

When torrent state does need to be re-generated from scratch, it has features to assist the user with that process. Save Path can be changed in the Open Torrent dialog, in case the torrent's files aren't located in the default spot. If that location already contains files, Vuze offers to scan the contents for existing pieces and incorporate those into the torrent. And as a last resort, "Search for Existing Files..." was recently developed to assist with the process of recovering partial data for incomplete torrents, no matter where it's located or what form it's in. The response to that feature was extremely positive, because (as user SS said to summarize their own beta-testing of the feature) "Almost 200 dead torrents have seeds now."

But, an option that would have Vuze automatically do lots of extra file searching in multiple locations every time a torrent is loaded, even though it's totally unnecessary except in those rare situations (they are rare, right? Just how often do you find yourself reloading Vuze from scratch?) where Vuze is adding torrents with files already present on disk that it doesn't know about? Do I think it would be smart for the developers to add that?

I think you and my friend Dis would get along great.

(06-28-2017, 04:28 PM)'FeRDNYC' Wrote: [ -> ]

(06-28-2017, 12:18 PM)'ZippyDSMlee' Wrote: [ -> ]File dates only come in handy when you have to restore the OS or just have to reinstall the torrent program fresh and restart all the torrents without restarting the data, so if they are staggered in last time modified list you can drag and drop them more easily.

 

OK, yeah, I can definitely see that, for manual file-management timestamps can be a big help in determining what's what. I definitely keep my torrent directories sorted by (decreasing) modification date in the file browser, so that the newest stuff is always right at the top. Vuze makes a point of ignoring them, though, because as you say dates can change and it has much more reliable methods of identifying and organizing file data.

Quote:There is no option I can find to disable the “bring vuze to front window” or  “file move completed “ notification.

Really? I checked and all of the Interface > Alerts settings are even visible in Beginner settings mode, so they should be visible for you. I'd check (well, un-check, if they are checked) the Popups section options "Popup an alert when a file is finished" and "Popup an alert when a download is finished".

If you're not running the latest release version (5.7.5.0, you can see what version you have installed by chosing Help > About Vuze, the title of the window that comes up will be "About <version number>") then you should update Vuze. The list of things that can be configured in Interface > Alerts has definitely grown over time.

In the version I'm running, there's another option, "Reduce situations where the main window is automatically shown" — you could try turning that on and see if it cuts down on the interruptions. I'm not exactly sure how recently that setting was added to Vuze, though. If you're running the latest Vuze and it's not there it may be a beta feature. If you're willing to help test it out, it you could install the beta version and see if that makes any difference. (The Help menu in recent release versions contains an entry to "Join Beta program...", which will update you to the latest 5.7.5.1_B10 beta version.)

Oh, one last possibility, the latest Vuze (5.7.5.0) added a setting to "Post message to notifications" for certain types of tags, to be shown either "on Addition" or "on Removal". If you've tried everything else and still having issues with Vuze interrupting other tasks, you could go into Tags Overview and make sure that none of your tags have any notifications switched on. The options is waay down at the bottom of the Settings view. Mostly this applies to Manual tags, not automatic Download State tags which don't allow notifications to be set. So if you don't have any manual tags configured it's unlikely to be an issue. However, there are a few Category tags like "All" and "Uncategorized", as well as automatically-created Manual tags like "Untagged", that do allow notifications to be set.

Quote:I dunno would it not be smart of the devs to just program it to scan all locations inputted and not just the single default cache? If you are highly organized have everything in separate folders a single folder is not going to help you any. Everything I have moved is moved by Vuze unless it’s a few torrents I am trying to restore since I have a few left over from UTorrent, even with the data in the right cache folder it does not always find it, just saying an option to scan input inputted folders plus cache folder then on completion move to completed folder deleting any extras in the process, boil it down its 2 check boxes and a line for folder locations. Can a plugin do a data check and move files then update their locations in vuze?

Well, nearly anything is possible through a plugin, so I'd assume one could be written to do what it sounds like you're asking. And I certainly don't speak for the Vuze developers — I'm just Some Guy (who's been using Vuze extensively for over 10 years), and my opinion is just that. But regarding "would it not be smart of the devs...", my opinion is that, no, it's actually very smart of them not to do that.

Let me go off on a bit of a tangent a to tell you the #TrueStory of my friend, who shall remain nameless because I'm too much of a pussy to call him out by name (though it'd be well-deserved), who we'll just refer to as The Disorganized Photographer or "Dis" for short. Dis liked to use Picasa to sort through and display the photos on his computer, imported from the memory cards in his various digital cameras. But Dis absolutely refused to be forced to organize the photos on his computer, and wanted to be able to dump them absolutely anywhere... and still have them show up in Picasa. So, he made sure Picasa was configured to scan the entire contents of EVERY SINGLE DRIVE on his system. Its scanning locations were literally configured as "C:\ ; F:\ ; G:\ ; H:\ ; N:\ ; O:\ ; R:\". (Yes, he really had 7 or more hard drives installed in the machine, each one tens/hundred of gigabytes, then eventually multiple terabytes, all of them packed to the gills with all manner of files (often multiple copies of the same files in different places), scattered randomly around in folders with informative names like "old hard drive" and "card dump" and "Desktop" and "New Folder (37)". ...Again, none of this is a joke. In fact I once found a folder on his desktop that was called "Desktop", containing another folder called "Desktop"! There were digital camera photos inside C:\Users\Dis\Desktop\Desktop\Desktop\, because of course there were.)

No matter how hard I tried, I could never impress upon Dis that the reason why Picasa ran incredibly slow on his machine, took days (literally DAYS) to scan for photos, often would fail to notice new ones until he forced it to do a full rescan (again, DAYS), and basically just worked very poorly in general (something he complained about loudly and often!), was entirely his fault. He was sabotaging it with his insane configuration, and forcing it to work in a way it's not meant to, wasn't designed to handle, and would never NOT cause huge problems. Picasa's databases would grow to hundreds of megabytes in size (data which all has to load each time it's run, and which has to be updated whenever photos are discovered or edited), and those monstrous databases were mostly stuffed with useless data it had to collect just so it could keep track of the files it doesn't need to manage. Because not only does Picasa have to store data about all of the photos it's managing, but when it scans locations like C:\Windows\ and C:\Applications\ — to say nothing of C:\Users\Dis\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\whatever\cache2\ and the like — it stores information about every single non-image file it finds, to record the fact that those files don't contain image data and don't need to be re-examined in the future. Same thing when you have it scanning folders full of hundreds of gigabytes of MP3 music and MP4 video files just because there might happen to be a few photos scattered in there with them.

File-scanning is an intensive process, far more intensive in a bittorrent client than in a photo manager. If you ever need to be convinced of that, just use "Search For Existing Files..." and watch how long it takes just to scan a single folder, even when the files there are part of the torrent. Or, hell, just run a "Force Re-Check" on a big torrent. I have a slightly older machine with slow-ish hard drives, admittedly, but if Vuze has to re-check a huge 20- or 30-Gig torrent containing many thousands of files, it's gonna take several minutes before it gets to "Checking: 100%". And that's just to scan one single location when the files are all there!

Because scanning is so intensive, Vuze contains a lot of code with the sole purpose of avoiding it as much as possible, even for the files it does have to deal with. It protects the same file from being part of multiple torrents (unless the user is crazy enough to switch that protection off), minimizing the chances of file corruption or contention which causes re-checking. It has Fast Resume mode which constantly records current activity, so if Vuze crashes, when it starts up again it can re-check only the pieces that were in use before the crash. It can be set up to keep configuration backups (even on a separate disk, for maximum protection), so that if the software or the OS does have to be reinstalled, the previous configuration can be restored and everything can be picked up right where it was before.

When torrent state does need to be re-generated from scratch, it has features to assist the user with that process. Save Path can be changed in the Open Torrent dialog, in case the torrent's files aren't located in the default spot. If that location already contains files, Vuze offers to scan the contents for existing pieces and incorporate those into the torrent. And as a last resort, "Search for Existing Files..." was recently developed to assist with the process of recovering partial data for incomplete torrents, no matter where it's located or what form it's in. The response to that feature was extremely positive, because (as user SS said to summarize their own beta-testing of the feature) "Almost 200 dead torrents have seeds now."

But, an option that would have Vuze automatically do lots of extra file searching in multiple locations every time a torrent is loaded, even though it's totally unnecessary except in those rare situations (they are rare, right? Just how often do you find yourself reloading Vuze from scratch?) where Vuze is adding torrents with files already present on disk that it doesn't know about? Do I think it would be smart for the developers to add that?

I think you and my friend Dis would get along great.

 

Sorry tis taken so long to reply my moods and anxity have made me a wreck, not beign creative is bad for me ><

Well file scan would not need to be automatic you just run a file check as needed, tho in my case it would be nice if there was a thing that could see what’s in my temp torrent data file location then look through torrent files on disc to match. It would be a slow process yes but better than doing 200ish items by hand.

Cmd prompt custom search does not seem to get what I want to do either, then again command line stuff turns into gibbierish to me after 30 charatcers or so LOL ><
I need soemthing to compile files  and folders with no sub folder then hunt a torrent folder for anything matching you’d think someone would have made a simple search app by now that could use a list…. oh well I guess a bit at a time is all I will get too...