PSA: You can permaseed torrents forever with Google Drive

A good tracker tries to preserve and maintain torrents for as long as possible but due to space constraints of it's users, some torrents inevitably die.

For many users, it's not really feasible to permaseed everything they download because they delete what they watch after and/or don't own 20+ TB in storage.

Google offers unlimited storage to GSuite users which costs $12 a month and a domain of your choosing (weird extensions can be found for really cheap). Technically unlimited storage is only available when 5 or more users are signed up but as of now, they don't enforce this. In addition, you can try checking your old alumni email to see if they use GSuite and thus offer unlimited storage for free to you.

Then to connect Google Drive to an actual drive you can read and write to is actually pretty easy. If you're using Windows, I highly suggest StableBit CloudDrive. It's a paid software that costs $30 but to me it was worth every penny. It's braindead simple and just works. Considering how much I was saving from hard drives, it's not such a hard cost to swallow. Unfortunately, CloudDrive is not available on Linux so the best option is to use RClone. It's free and works well but is a little more complex to set up. However, there's loads of tutorials out there to help you set it up.

Now at the end of this all, you should have a fully unlimited drive that you can permaseed everything. Because of the nature of a cloud drive, you're not going to be getting much upload. If there's many other seeders, by the time you download the proper piece for the torrent, the leecher will might have already have gotten it from someone else. The purpose of this is for long term archival and if you're permaseeding multiple terabytes, the bonus points you will accrue is usually quite significant.

I have around 50TB myself and use it not just for torrents but full backups of my Windows drive and my Plex files.

*To clear up some confusion on API hits. RClone will have a high usage of API hits but StableBit won't because of it's caching system.

You can use cache with rclone simple enough, just use some cache flags like this:

Code:

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rclone mount google: /mnt/downloads--allow-non-empty --size-only --timeout 1h --dir-cache-time 2m --vfs-cache-max-age 72h --vfs-read-chunk-size 64M --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 5G --drive-chunk-size 128M --buffer-size 64M

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Also you not download directly to the mount, not sure if this counts for StableBit CloudDrive but Google Drive does not suppose random writes which is what happens when you download torrents. It's best to download to a local drive and then move files on completion. Most torrent clients allow you to do this in the settings.