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Another Dropbox trick: start BitTorrent downloads remotely!
Let's say you're at work, and you don't want to download several gigs of music to your work computer. It'd be nice to find the torrents you want and have the downloads start on your home machine, right? Here's how to do it with Dropbox: a lot of BitTorrent clients can watch a folder for new .torrent files and start downloads automatically. If your point your app to a folder on your Dropbox account, you can add a .torrent file to it from any computer, and the download will start automatically.
[via Lifehacker]
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsBrendanJan 11th 2010 2:48PM
This trick is as old as Dropbox.
larsJan 11th 2010 3:33PM
You can access a lot of torrent clients remotely. Usually they even have a web interface. The two big ones, utorrent and Vuze/Azuerus have that.
THJJan 11th 2010 3:33PM
Does anyone know a way to either:
Monitor both a dropbox folder and the downloads folder
or
move the file from the dropbox folder to the downloads folder?
larsJan 11th 2010 3:34PM
Don't know what you wanna accomplish with that... You can just monitor the dropbox for .torrents and have the client save elsewhere.
THJJan 11th 2010 4:03PM
Sorry- didn't explain properly - If I d/l a torrent file locally, it automatically goes to my downloads folder (watched in Vuze), then fires up Vuze and starts to do its thing. If I want to add a torrent remotely, I put it in a designated folder in dropbox, and Chronosync copies it to the Downloads folder (set to run blindly every 60 minutes).
Here's where it breaks - if I don't remember to then remove the file from the dropbox folder, then I will end up with multiple copies of the same torrent file(s) being copied over from dropbox to downloads.
There's probably a way to set up a folder action through Automator to move instead of copy the file, but I am terrible at making scripts, even with a GUI.
BrendanJan 11th 2010 5:37PM
Why not just make you default download folder in you dropbox folder? If you're using firefox you just change the preferences.
RUGRLNJan 12th 2010 1:19AM
Clever...nice trick..
derek.organJan 12th 2010 4:32AM
Two things:
1. This works well with SugarSync as well ..
2. Using a free logmein account is another way to do this.
In both cases you will need to leave on your home computer of course.
Bobby RockJan 13th 2010 5:10AM
Wow, really interesting feature. I recommended everyone to use dropbox for storing and synchronizing securely and for free 2gb of files.
ariaxJan 19th 2010 1:16PM
You might also want to check out the official Dropbox wiki for more tweaks, e.g. using it to store web pages!
http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks
Bobbys link may well be maxed out at this time, so try this one to receive 250MB of additional space to your initial 2GB for a total of 2'250MB:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTEwNTA4Njk