Dropbox Torrent uses Dropbox to load torrents on local PCs

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 14, 2013
Updated • Mar 14, 2013
Internet
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If you work on multiple computer systems, some local some remote, you may have encountered situations where you'd want one of your remote machines to handle a task. Maybe you discovered a torrent that you want to download, but since you are not at the right location to do so, you may have come up with a workaround. Maybe you have attached the torrents to emails for safekeeping or loaded them into online storage.

Services like Iffft may have improved the handling for you, by automating the task so that you do not have to load that torrent manually on a system once you got access to it locally. And some clients, like uTorrent, can monitor locations on a computer systems for new torrents that you add to it.

The basic idea behind Dropbox Torrent is very similar. It is a program that monitors your Dropbox folder for new torrents, and when it finds any, it will start to add those torrents to its internal client and start the downloading right away.

Here is how it works in detail:

  1. You install Dropbox Torrent on a local Windows system and run it from C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\PhrozenSoft\PDBOXTORRENT afterwards.
  2. A click on Settings displays the Dropbox path, device name, the number of tasks that you want the program to run at the same time, and the logs count you want displayed. Make sure the Dropbox path is set correctly here. There does not seem to be an option to change it though.
  3. All you need to do now is save torrent files you want to download on the computer Dropbox Torrent is running on into the main Dropbox directory.

You do not really have control over the downloading itself. You can't for instance specify upload or download limits, remove broken or non-working downloads from the finalized work table, or change other torrent related settings such as ports.

You can configure the uTorrent client for pretty much the same task. The main benefit here is that you get better controls over the process.

Here is what you need to do:

  1. Open uTorrent and click on Options > Preferences or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-P.
  2. Switch to Directories on the left and locate the "automatically load .torrents from" section here.
  3. Select a Dropbox folder, or any other file hosting folder, e.g. SkyDrive or Google Drive, here.
  4. Torrents that you move into that folder will be loaded into uTorrent automatically, provided that the system uTorrent is running on is up and connected to the Internet.

utorrent load remote torrents dropbox

I do prefer uTorrent for this right now as it is offering better controls over the whole process.

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Comments

  1. DR said on March 15, 2013 at 2:20 pm
    Reply

    I also use uTorrent to scan an Autoload folder in Dropbox. It’s worked like a champ for at least a couple of years now.

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