Pre-Allocating

[ihavefleas]

I'm checking to see if anyone has been having the same issue as me before I make a ticket or if I just have bad luck.

This issue is with multi-file torrents where some are set to not download via "Display torrent content and some options" . qBittorrent v3.0.8.

I had a post before with pre-allocation problems back with late v2/early v3. Those were solved simply by turning off pre-allocating.
Just a bit ago I was having an I/O issue with many downloads that had larger files. They would stop downloading and the I/O warning would pop up at the system tray. I would try to continue the downloads and they would go for a short while but at a very slow speed and eventually error again. That issue was completely solved by enabling pre-allocation.
While the pre-allocating is much better than it was previously (in regards to torrent files, magnet links will require extra work regardless since the file list is generated after the torrent begins) sometimes when I add torrents a couple of the unwanted files will be in the main folder instead of sent to the hidden unwanted folder. It's not consistent, sometimes it will be tiny files that are just a few kB and some are large double digit - triple digit MB files.
This isn't all the time. Some days it will work exactly as wanted but some days over half of the torrents will have lingering unwanted files.

[Avelon]

With pre-allocation all files get their space on your disk.
Because with torrent not every file has it's own piece, it happens that one piece contains information about two files.

Result: you get the pre-allocated full-space of the unwanted files even if it only contains a small piece of the unwanted file.

Wanted: file A
Unwanted: file B
Piece that contains file A (and a little bit of B): piece 1
Result on your disk when downloading piece 1: file A & file B get created and pre-allocated on your disk.

Is this what you mean?
What do you mean with 'sent to the hidden unwanted folder'? Do you mean to have a place for unfinished torrents that get copied to your destination folder once finished and here it is where those unwanted files appear, too?

[ihavefleas]

When you have a multi-file torrent and you set some to not download, qBT creates a hidden folder called .unwanted within the folder of the specific torrent. You can see it by setting your Folder Options to show hidden folders.

I'll use this structure as the example.

-- Folder Where Downloading Torrents Are
    -- My Torrent Folder    [The folder that holds the files for the torrent, where all the wanted files are]
        -- .unwanted Folder    [Where the unwanted files are]

So I may have been thinking about this the wrong way but I'll re-cap.

I thought that unwanted files and files that had bits of data in the same torrent piece were sent to the .unwanted folder. When I had pre-allocating turned off I noticed that 1-2 files got put in the .unwanted folder while the files I wanted remaining in the My Torrent folder. This way when the torrent is removed only the files you wanted remain.

Is it possible that with pre-allocating on, the unwanted files that have data in the same piece as the wanted files could get put in the My Torrent instead of properly put in the .unwanted folder? And the cases where everything works properly, the wanted files pretty much got lucky to have pieces all to themselves?

When the torrent is removed from qBT it just deletes the .unwanted folder to rid of the partials and unwanted files and doesn't check to see if any unwanted files are in the My Torrent folder.

[Avelon]

To be honest I have never seen an '.unwanted' folder though my hidden files on the system are visible.
I do not use the confirming dialog when adding a torrent. I just do it when the torrent is added which means I cannot confirm your way. So now I know of the existence of such a folder and how it gets created, but I cannot help, sorry.

When I do it my way, there are pre-allocated files, of course, all using their full space on disk even though they are empty. I was never concerned with space. But it is and should be important for space-efficiency.

[ihavefleas]

Yeah I just shrugged it off. It's only a convenience thing and not a program breaking thing.

Also, if you don't have the "Display torrent content and some options" checked but have pre-allocating on the .unwanted folder will not be created since all files associated with the torrent are already pre-allocated in the torrent specific folder. If you close QBT (of pause the torrent), deleted even 1 of the files from the folder, go back into qBT and set that file to DND (via right-click) the hidden folder should appear in the torrent folder.
Back in the late v2's you could add a torrent in pause state with pre-allocating on and the files wouldn't be added until you started the torrent. I did it your way back at that time, it made it quite convenient for having torrents auto-added from a folder and it never gave me the issue I'm having now. I suppose I could go back to that version but I'm all for progress.

[Avelon]

My avatar tells me that progress isn't always done by moving forward. It's most important what's the focus and the idea behind it. Even a backstep can be progress.
So your way sounds really good and should be applied for the reason of overview.
Have you tried 3.1 alpha?
I'm not sure whether it can solve your problem, but it's one of the next steps. The issues are sometimes not related to qB itself, but to its dependencies and/or libraries. I am not really deeply informed about the details of this matter. Sorry Just wanted to help anyway ^.^ My alpha and the one before have an issue, too, but I'm really patient. I think it's gonna be fixed sometime and that's okay for me. Some of my paused torrents start to reactivate themselves and some don't. I kinda like it - like kids that won't stop playing while they're full of joy and pleasure. They just keep going on ^^

[ihavefleas]

I agree with your point on progress in many cases. However, in this case I discovered something I overlooked before which lead me to add a Wishlist item to the Github. If you add a torrent via magnet link all the files will be added to the torrents main folder regardless, as you cannot uncheck items via the torrent details. So you'd have to manually delete unwanted items anyway.

I'm pretty much going to leave it now that I've added the Wishlist and let the devs decide its importance. Because really, if I don't have the time to highlight a few things and it the delete button then I probably shouldn't spend the time torrenting in the first place. XD

Thanks for your replies.