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Terasaur BitTorrent resources

What is BitTorrent?

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer technology for transferring files. The bittorrent.com site has a good overview of the concepts, and of course, there’s a BitTorrent page on Wikipedia with lots of details and references.

A few things make BitTorrent a good solution for publishing or downloading large files.

  • Support for multi-gigabyte downloads (even 100′s of GB)
  • Easy download stop and restart
  • A wealth of free and/or open source clients

Don’t let the peer-to-peer label or the news articles scare you. ibiblio only allows legal content on terasaur, and your computer won’t get hacked merely by using BitTorrent.

What if I have trouble downloading?

First, if you’re reading this page, your network connection is working. That’s probably not the problem. Next, not all BitTorrent clients work on all platforms on all networks. Try a different client from the list below. If that doesn’t work, be patient. It could be a transient problem that will resolve itself in a few minutes. Lastly, try plugging into the user community of your BitTorrent client or find a techie friend to help.

Please note that the Seed Bank does not yet support UTP. Some clients (e.g. Transmission for Mac) have problems connecting to non-UTP-enabled peers when UTP is enabled. If your client doesn’t connect to any peers, try turning off UTP the options/preferences. We expect to add UTP support soon.

Recommended BitTorrent clients

The first time you download files from terasaur, you may need to install a BitTorrent client. We have a few recommendations below.

Transmission: A good overall BitTorrent client. It’s easy to use and has an active user community with help forums. Mac OS and Linux. Open source.

µTorrent: Popular BitTorrent client for Mac OS, but it’s also available for Windows and Linux. Free. Closed source.

BitTorrent Windows client: Free. Closed source.