Odd Partial Download Behavior
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Just for clarity, I've accepted that the "incident I'm about to describe" occurred and am taking the steps to fix it, but I'd really, really like to know what happened and why, so I don't have to this again (it's a pain in rear.)
So I had several partially downloaded torrents in uTorrent (3.4.9 build 43388). These were things that were parts of largish collections where I already had most of the files or wasn't otherwise interested. I'm aware of the risks associated with partial downloads with respect to not being a recognized seeder in the event of a ratio "issue" (something I thought would never happen), but preferred to be frugal of both my disk space, bandwidth, and ratio. I was working towards something over 1.0 and concentrating alot of seeing freeleech.
Anyways, I went on vacation. Before I left, I stopped all the torrents and closed uTorrent. For a variety of reasons I don't leave uTorrent running unattended for long periods of time.
Fast forward to me coming back. I get home, turn on the computer, hook to the VPN, and fire up uTorrent. I just started all the torrents back up like I've done a bunch of times before. They all seemed to start normally, and the ones that were partials seemed to be doing the usual "download a little bit" (for reasons I still can't fathom) and then realize that everything is downloaded that I want and switch over to seeding. I watched several do that, but started to get really tired and went to bed, assuming the rest would follow suit.
Here is where it got odd. Three of those partial torrents never "stopped" that downloading. So uTorrent stat there for like 9 hours happily downloading away. Something to the tune of 60 GB worth of data. It didn't write any of it any watchable files on my computer, though there were very large .dat files in the download folders. And of course all that meaningless download got reported back to the tracker, royally screwing my ratio.
As I said at the beginning, I've accepted it happened, and am working to repair the damage, but if anyone has any insights into what happened, or why, I'd really appreciate it. I do not want to have to go through this again.
Also I should add that I couldn't seem to do anything with those .dat files. Even if changed the priority of the "skipped" pieces to "Normal", uTorrent didn't cough up the data into a usable form. In fact it just started trying to download the segments again….
As I said, thoughts or insights into what happened and how to prevent it would be greatly appreciated!