barnaclebill

So, yeah: Do you save your torrent files or delete them after you've added them to your favorite torrent client? Why? Not the underlying data, just the torrent files themselves.

I'm undecided. I figure if I save them and back them up to an offline/offsite device, then I can (mostly/hopefully) recover from hardware failure by simply re-adding all the torrent files to my favorite client. The downside is deciding how to organize them.

I'd love to hear from the community on this.

As a torrent seeder, does one's max upload speed affect their likelihood of connecting w/ leechers? I know about port forwarding and all that jazz, but suppose a leecher adds a torrent with 10 seeders—does the leecher's client give any sort of preferential treatment for seeders w/ faster connections or is it basically each seeder has an equal (in this case, 10%) chance of being the chosen one? In other words, do seeders w/ normie home internet connections have a disadvantage over those w/ the faster connections?

For occasional torrent creation, qBittorrent has Tools > Torrent Creator, but suppose one has hundreds of folders from which to create individual torrents. A quick internet search yields forum posts from more than ten years ago mentioning dead projects. For example, this Reddit post from 2013 mentions qMakeTorrent, which is no longer maintained.

How are people doing this in 2025? I reckon one could write a bash or python script for this, but are there any user friendly tools out there that are built for this purpose and still actively maintained?

One has a folder of original content that they'd like to share/upload across the multiple private trackers that they're a member of. In qBittorrent, there's Tools > Torrent Creator, with various fields and a "Create Torrent" button. The "Tracker URLs" field accepts multiple URLs.

When creating the new torrent file(s), does one add the announce URLs for all their private trackers and then click Create Torrent (a single torrent file for all trackers), or is it best to only include one announce URL at a time (a separate torrent for each tracker)? Thanks.

Background: I'd like to turn an old personal laptop into a Jellyfin server so that I can stream media to my living room TV. I want to be able to expand what I use this server for over time. I'm leaning toward Proxmox as the OS so that I can spin up new containers for various services instead of installing a bunch of services on a base Debian install. I also want full disk encryption so that any data on the OS drive is less likely to be compromised by theft or Craigslist.

Question #1: I gather the general accepted approach for this is to first install Debian as a base w/ full disk encryption enabled and then install Proxmox on top because there is no option for full disk encryption in the native installer for Proxmox. Is this still the case?

Excerpt from this tutorial from November 2023 on the Proxmox Forum:

This tutorial deals with encryption of an existing installation. If you are starting fresh, my recommendation would be to install Debian with full disk encryption and then add Proxmox to it.

Excerpt from this post from February 2019 on the Level1Techs Forum:

The easiest way to do an encrypted Proxmox setup is to start with a minimal, vanilla Debian install. Set up the encrypted partition using the installer like you would with any other Debian system. Once installed, reboot. Then follow the guide for installing Proxmox on Debian.

Question #2: I don't mind entering the key manually whenever I reboot the server, but will I be able to unlock the server remotely? For example, suppose I'm tinkering in the web admin panel or an SSH session and I want/need to reboot—will I have to physically go over to the laptop and enter the key every time?

Also, I appreciate any other tips from the community to help me think about this in the right way. Thanks!