fickle gods

Thriving on inconsistencies

Awesome marriage between Dropbox and uTorrent

There is a simple little thing you can do with Dropbox and uTorrent that makes everything just a tiny bit cooler. It’s really a small thing but easily outweighs itself in awesomeness. In summary, it’s telling uTorrent to automatically load torrent files from a Dropbox folder. This will allow you to remotely add files to your download queue. I feel like it’s one of those “Why doesn’t everyone do this already?” things.

Easy Set up

If you haven’t done so already, download and install uTorrent and Dropbox. Both are awesome programs; if you want to know more about Dropbox, I’ve written about it here and here. Inside your Dropbox directory create a folder and call it what you want, for instance TorrentFiles, because that’s what we’re putting in it. It doesn’t need to be public or shared, but you can do that if you feel like that’s a good idea (many other cool things you can do).

Next, in uTorrent, open up the “preferences” and under “Directories” set your previously set torrent file save location in the field for “Automatically load .torrents from:”. Now every time you want to download something, grab the torrent and stick it in your designated torrent folder in Dropbox,  and if the PC running uTorrent is running at the moment or if you’re turning it on later, the file will automatically be included in uTorrent’s download queue.

That’s all there is to it. The reason I like this solution is I only download torrents (run uTorrent) on my home PC but I’m away from it most of the time. I can add torrents to the queue from literally anywhere because of the Dropbox app for Android and Dropbox’s web interface. There are a ton of other tricks you can derive from this, such as moving completed files into your Dropbox directory (if you’ve got enough space for that) for ultimate remote-ness.

If you’ve got some cool tips and tricks to share I would love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks!

 

Discussion