rtorrent is very nice tool to download torrents quickly and on headless systems. However, while making such a quick use, I was caught by its weird design decision that it comes unconfigured and while not configured explicitly it does not store its session in any way, even as torrent files of jobs that were started. I can imagine that in many cases it is not a problem as still usually torrent files are easily available and if not using magnet to obtain one is not a problem. Unfortunately I ran into such a weird situation where I was not able to start a job again with just a magnet link and obviously was not able to download whole torrent at one run. Also saving session in rtorrent was not working. So the only chance for me to recover download job was to use meta file that rtorrent leaves behind for reason unknown. There is even Github issue discussing those files and requesting ability to use them to recover the job. But unfortunately it is still open. So the only way for me was to do it myself. Continue reading “How to recover torrent from rtorrent meta files”