Would someone be kind enough to explain what Torrents are all about?

scoopeeedoo said:

I really don't realize the interest of torrents...

Well, when a new Linux distro is released, the official servers linking to the file are swamped. So, if you try to download this way, the download can take 20+ hours to complete. However, if you use a torrent to get a Linux distro after release, since you rely on so many different sources you can usually finish the download in about 30 minutes. So, that's what I use torrents for.

I thought that guy who made a thread on here yesterday saying he uses Torrents to share photos with his son and daughter was a good use of it. Sure there's other ways too, but it seemed to work well for him.

Everlong said:

I thought that guy who made a thread on here yesterday saying he uses Torrents to share photos with his son and daughter was a good use of it. Sure there's other ways too, but it seemed to work well for him.

I'm totally unsure how a torrent would help here as there isn't going to be other people downloading these files to then make them available to others for the download. A torrent for a very small distribution like this doesn't make much sense to me.

pparks1 said:

Everlong said:

I thought that guy who made a thread on here yesterday saying he uses Torrents to share photos with his son and daughter was a good use of it. Sure there's other ways too, but it seemed to work well for him.

I'm totally unsure how a torrent would help here as there isn't going to be other people downloading these files to then make them available to others for the download. A torrent for a very small distribution like this doesn't make much sense to me.

I don't understand where you're coming from. The files are on one PC, which is where the .torrent file is created. This is then sent to the people who want it, so in the person's case who made the thread, it was sent to 2 people. These 2 people then download the files from there. The torrent only needs 1 seed uploading to make it available to anyone who has the .torrent file. Once they have finished the download, they can stop seeding.

And I'm not saying there isn't other ways to do it, but it still worked fine for them. He said zipping the file would be too large for places that were suggested, and one of the images was 50mb, and he didn't want it splitting up.

Everlong said:

I don't understand where you're coming from. The files are on one PC, which is where the .torrent file is created. This is then sent to the people who want it, so in the person's case who made the thread, it was sent to 2 people. These 2 people then download the files from there. The torrent only needs 1 seed uploading to make it available to anyone who has the .torrent file. Once they have finished the download, they can stop seeding.

And I'm not saying there isn't other ways to do it, but it still worked fine for them. He said zipping the file would be too large for places that were suggested, and one of the images was 50mb, and he didn't want it splitting up.

My point was that torrents are typically used to increase the speed of downloading. While it's possible after 2 people have the files, the 3rd person might get them faster....however if there were 500+ people with all of files....the benefits of the torrent would become more evident.

If the point is simply to find a way to share a file...a torrent works. But so would an FTP server.

Well yea, you don't really start to see the benefits of torrents until quite a considerable amount of people are sharing the same file as that's only when I've used torrents myself. My point was I've never seen someone use them to just share the odd file(s) between family members even though there are simpler ways.