Dat files in Bittorrent question

[WW3hasstarted]

Hi , i downloaded a magnet file of the amazing race asia off a torrent site( well know that i trust)  that was 66.34gb in total but as i only wanted a couple of season out of the pack containing many seasons i unselected the majority of the pack leaving me

to download about 9gb of it... how ever when it finished downloading i noticed a dat file in the folder for this torrent thats 52.4gb in size !!! wtf is going on , often when ive completed a torrent theres a dat file and ive learnt we can delete them ( what are they ?? ) but theyre normally tiny in file size just afew kb usually

so why have i downloaded 52gb of junk if i deselected it ?? is there a way to turn this 52gb into the video files ( seeing as ive used all that bandwidth/data if i can i may as well keep the videos ) 

thanks for any help

[SectorVector]

Edit: Realized you are probably referring to 'BitTorrent' client. I hope the answer still applies.

You are possibly using utorrent.

The answer here explains the purpose of the .dat file, to which you are possibly referring to.

The partfile stores necessary data when doing selective downloading. Without it, several of the other files you don't want would be created (and thus wasting more space). If you delete the partfile, you'll screw it up. and have to re-download several pieces. Since a piece can span more than one file, the parts of the piece that span into files you skipped are stored in the partfile.

Going by that and the numbers you mention, it appears you may have downloaded almost all of the torrent.

However I don't understand why selecting a couple of folders alone, resulted in your client fetching so much extra data.
A guess. Any chance you unselected the folders after starting the torrent ?
Perhaps there's a better answer.

Do always mention your client and version in such cases.

You could select everything in the torrent and perform a hash check to see how much of the torrent has been actually downloaded.

Note: Am not much of a utorrent user. So hopefully someone else will help you out with a better reply.

[joew771]

The .dat file is a partial file. if you end up getting a huge file, that probably means you didn't pick your selected files soon enough and that it started to download bits of all the files. For instance in your case with a 66gb file, it probably started downloading, and got a piece of this file and that file, and by time you selected what files you actually wanted, it had already started a bunch of them. So it kept the large .dat file not knowing if you would want to download them later or what.

After you get the files you want, you can delete the .dat file. And no, there is no way to convert it into actual files unless you pick more complete files to download.

[WW3hasstarted]

hi thanks for the reply , yes the client i use is Bittorrent which is identical to utorrent , i had deselected the stuff i didnt want before starting the download so its a mystery as to why i ended up with 52gb of junk !

( i presume theres no way to extract the videos from that dat file ) its not a major problem for me as i download that amount daily so ill just delete it in a week or so once this threads had time for more to see it and maybe advise me on whether the 52gb can be changed or not.

im using Bittorent 7.9.5 , i ended up with amazng race asia s1 as 4.28gb, amazing race asia s2 as 5.12gb anf the dat file as 52.4gb ! , bittorent client shows i downloaded 61.8gb of a 66.3gb file the difference is i also deselected something in portuguese which is no use to me.

info i copy and paste from the torrent.. Note 1: Season 2-5 are new rips than before, so they can\'t be resumed from the old torrents (located at: http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/365601/229044/ and http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1148348/1832352/ ), but Asia Season 1, US Season 1, 5-11 are resumable.

Note 2: About \"A Corrida Milionária\", I could only find the first four episodes, if anyone has anymore, be sure to upload them and send me a PM.

Season 1 (English): DVD-rips by gothic, nuff said.
Season 2-12 (English): Good/Great/Excellent TV-rips by diffrent groups.

Asia Season 1-2 (English): Great encodes by brint. Everyone, thank him a lot for giving us TAR Asia!

A Corrida Milionária Season 01 (Portuguese): Good quality encodes.

note i didnt get this from demonoid, not sure im allowed to mention another site thats not tpb but its a rival other site thats very popular ( and still alive as in its not kat )

anyway thanks for the reply and any future advice : )

[SectorVector]

You can make a reseed post in our Requests section (Videos). That would be better.

You may post the torrent links too. It's ok. There're no rivals here. ;-)

[joew771]

I'm not sure about bitorrent, but I know that you can't select what you want to download with utorrent until it has already connected to seeders and gotten the file info from them. And that's when you can select what files you want or not, and by then it may have already started multiple files. I've had it happen to me many times where I only want one episode of something, and for whatever reason I have to get a season of it, and by the time I've picked the file I actually want it has already gotten pieces of many different files.

[SectorVector]

joe: Idk. This might help for utorrent. (The option name seems different in Bittorrent client. Default: Enabled).
utorrent: Options -> Preferences -> UI Settings -> Show a window that displays the files inside a torrent.

WW3hasstarted: I tried using latest Bittorrent client. Am unable to replicate the problem.

[joew771]

joe: Idk. This might help for utorrent. (The option name seems different in Bittorrent client. Default: Enabled).
utorrent: Options -> Preferences -> UI Settings -> Show a window that displays the files inside a torrent.

WW3hasstarted:  I tried using latest Bittorrent client. Am unable to replicate the problem.

Personally I have that set that way already, but the thing is, that only works for adding a torrent file to download and not for magnet links. Though that's a good point. The op could just download the torrent instead of using the magnet. That may help. If that's the problem in the first place.

I haven't used anything but magnets for so long, that I forgot all about that.