A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
You re-downloaded your media to get better quality files.
I re-downloaded my media because I misconfigured Radarr.
We are not the same.
Also, pro-tip: When configuring Radarr (or Sonarr for that matter), be sure to define a recycle bin.
I woke up the next morning with all my media wiped. That was in June/July. I’m still recovering.
Jesus what did you do?
I had Radarr pointed to the “Movie” folder, then I changed it to the “Media” folder thinking that that would somehow be “better”.
Whoosh It was all gone the next time I looked, because it couldn’t find entries for whatever it came across, I guess. I ended up having to re-design the whole environment from pretty much scratch. The good news was that since I had “imported” my library initially, I had references to most of the stuff I lost.
That’s just bad program design.
My own take on it is that it’s, hmm, not really bad design, just unforgiving.
When you see that you’re about to make more than X number of changes, Stop… verify with the user, then move forward.
Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
- qbittorrent is better in many many ways compared to utorrent and hasa very similar interface. qbit is open-source, utorrent isn’t. qbit doesn’t have ads or malware, utorrent has or has had both many times. qbit allows you to bind to a specific network interface (e.g. you VPN connection instead of regular ethernet one) which offer better protection if your vpn drops. feel free to do your own research here or elsewhere on the web if you doubt any of my points.
- if your VPN is a free one, that wont protect you at all. those guys will squeal and turn over server logs with ip address at the drop of a hat. Even a lot of paid-for VPNs are shitty lying bastards. So picking a good vpn can be challenging there are probably posts here covering recommendations but generally you want ones that have either been taken to court and were unable to provide logs OR ones that have been audited by a respected 3rd party firm that can confirm they are truly a “no log VPN”. I can recommend PIA, NordVPN, and Mullvad as some ones that are highly unlikely to turn over any logs (bc they don’t have them) but there are others and doing your own research isn’t a bad thing. The site torrentfreak.com does an article once a year or so that covers a few of the more popular VPNs and different aspects of thier privacy but they don’t declare a “best vpn”, just rate them on varius privacy and security aspects.
- Even if you have a good VPN, check that you aren’t leaking your real IP via dns lookups: ipleak.net or dnsleaktest.com
- Check that you torrent client set up not to leak: search for ‘torrent ip leak test’ and do one of the torrent ip leak tests. ipleak.net hasone of these if you scroll down on the page; look for “Torrent Address detection” and click “Activate” button and it will give a magnet link to start test with
- additionally, you can set up a “vpn killswitch” to prevent traffic from going over regular internet if you vpn drops. If you using qbit, this probably isn’t strictly required but many people here like to have this as an additional safety. i can’t really provide details on this bc the process varies widely. A lot of VPN client apps have this feature built in. But even if they don’t, you can set something like this up in most firewalls but exact steps will vary depending on OS (Windows/Linux/Mac) and which firewall you are using (or I guess whether or not you even have one installed).
you can set up a “vpn killswitch” … A lot of VPN client apps have this feature built in.
Most quality VPNs will have a killswitch built in and enabled automatically, with nothing to setup, but they are notoriously unreliable and can fail. The key term people want to search for is “bind.” You want to bind qBit to your VPN. If your VPN isn’t working, qBit doesn’t have a connection. Most decent, privacy first, “no log” VPNs (Mullvad, Proton, AirVPN, iVPN, etc.) will provide instructions on binding. This is above and beyond their built-in killswitch.
I can recommend PIA, NordVPN
I’m not saying you shouldn’t recommend these, or that people shouldn’t use them, but IMO, people should at least be warned to search for the following, so they can make an informed decision:
- “kape technologies malware” (Kape owns Private Internet Access, which is why I switched to Mullvad years ago when Kape bought PIA)
- “nordvpn data breach”
NordVPN also doesn’t have port forwarding so you’re unlikely to be able to seed anything back. This’ll get you banned from private trackers and goes against the whole concept of torrenting.
Yeah, Mullvad stopped offering Port Forwarding as well, along with iVPN (I think) and some others. I believe AirVPN is the recommended VPN which still has PF (I may have iVPN and Air mixed up). I understand one of the reasons why they stopped supporting PF (it allowed sick f*cks to share illegal child content with others), but it also pretty much destroyed my ability to find and complete a download of old/er files that I normally didn’t have a problem with, and, like you mentioned, I could no longer seed back. It’s the sole reason why I started using usenet. I could have tried one of the other VPNs I mentioned (Proton & Air, which I believe both have PF) but I chose to stick with Mullvad and add usenet instead, which I’ve really liked.
Is this new in the past few months? I was using mulvad with qbitorrent a few months ago and it was uploading.
You can download and upload with no port forwarding. For some torrents you might not find peers, but whats even worse you will seed less
I can’t recall when it actually stopped working (maybe around 3 months ago?), but here is the announcement: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports
Fairly soon after they removed PF, I searched for a show that was less than a year from release, rated over 80% on TMDB & over 8.0 on IMDB, and pretty popular. I couldn’t complete a full season of it on any one format (720p, 1080p, x264, x265). Probably around 10 incomplete versions in qBit. Never ran into something that bad before, on a somewhat recent show. Started using usenet and had my files within an hour or so, in the format I wanted. I understand and support their decision, but it was a very good feature to have. If your looking for new material, PF won’t affect you. I’ve read people suggest Tailscale as a way to supplement Mullvad (if you’re running a server and want to remotely access it), but I know little about it.
That was lucky timing for me! I was updating all my media around June.
Yes I was actually sad to leave Mullvad, and the developer was pretty cool about giving refunds, so I’d definitely go back if things changed in the future.
AirVPN does have port forwarding and is what I wound up switching to. So far, everything is working fine and there are a decent number of servers available.
Glad that worked out with AirVPN, they’re the main alternative to Mullvad that I was considering back then. I may still try them in the future. Yeah, I was shocked that Mullvad was so cool about handing out refunds. I’ve read about many other VPNs that wouldn’t consider that. I guess with Mullvad being the official rebranded Mozilla VPN they can afford to let some people go and still have a smile about it.
Most quality VPNs will have a killswitch built in and enabled automatically, with nothing to setup, but they are notoriously unreliable and can fail.
Fair. I do all of my setup manually these days (networkmanager on linux, openvpn client app on the rare occasion i’m on windows, not a mac guy so no clue there). I implement one using a firewall but that is more complex than most people want. Still, as long as it is done in addition to the qbit network interface bind, then it’s not bad to also set a VPN killswitch.
The key term people want to search for is “bind.” You want to bind qBit to your VPN.
Agreed. This is what I was referencing in the first bullet about network interface
I’m not saying you shouldn’t recommend these, or that people shouldn’t use them, but IMO, people should at least be warned to search for the following, so they can make an informed decision:
1 - Fair points. TBH, I had my doubts about that initially but have been with them the whole time (before and after kape acquisition). FWIW, I have not seen any change in PIA service quality. In fact, I have seen them add Wireguard support and release all of the code as FOSS (see here). I agree that Kape did some sketchy shit in the past but from what I have seen over the last several years, they are not doing anything sketchy in the VPN/technology sector part of their business (aside from maybe advertising which I consider to be separate). I don’t even really think about Kape anymore tbh. If they were ratting me out, I would have had enough dcma notices to start a bonfire with by now.
2 - I had not been aware of that. I haven’t used them in a few years. Any sort of data breach definitely sounds bad but since I haven’t reviewed the details, I don’t want to jump to any conclusions either.
I like Mullvad from a tech and privacy standpoint but IMO they are a bit on the expensive side compared to some of the other options. Nord and PIA you can usually get multiyear deals on periodically and that can drastically lower the overall cost ($80 for a 3yr VPN plan = monthly about 2.22 USD/2.04 euro vs 5 euro/month for mullvad). Not saying price is the be-all-end-all or that Mullvad is unaffordable but it is going to be a consideration for many, especially people that already don’t want to shell out for a paid VPN over the free ones. With that in mind, I think there is still value in PIA (and possibly Nord - I haven’t reviewed the details of what exactly was breached - e.g. vpn service vs blog server vs etc, what data was exposed, what steps they took to address, etc). There are many other no-logs vpn options besides Nord, PIA, and Mullvad out there, I just don’t have any personal experience with them.
I should have also mentioned that I otherwise thought your initial post was good.
then it’s not bad to also set a VPN killswitch
At least with Mullvad (and I imagine the other three I mentioned), there is nothing to set. It’s already there in the app, and automatically enabled after install. The only thing that can be done is to turn it off.
This is what I was referencing in the first bullet about network interface
Understood. I was just providing the specific term (“bind” or “binding”), used by VPN companies & users, for anyone else who wants to search for instructions on properly connecting qBit to their VPN.
I agree that Kape did some sketchy shit in the past
It’s not my place to fault or criticize you or anyone else for choosing to go with Kape/PIA (or Nord). I just think people should at least know of their past. For me, there is zero chance of me returning to PIA. Someone tells me the girl I’m interested in cheated on their past boyfriend, or tried to somehow spy on or sabotage him? Zero chance I’m getting involved. Too many other good/better options available. My brother has had no issues dating cheaters. To each their own. None of my business why others make the choices they do.
Any sort of data breach definitely sounds bad but since I haven’t reviewed the details
It’s not necessarily that they had a data breach, it’s how they handled the situation that many people found troubling.
Nord and PIA you can usually get multiyear deals
Same with this. I don’t fault you for trying to save some money. Everyone has their own situation to deal with, and I’ve been “there” before. For me, I’m not rich or a boomer, but I’m old enough now and have enough disposable income that I make decisions that work for my privacy and reliability requirements. I see something that cheap now and I ask myself, “why is that so cheap?” It could still be a good product, but I know enough to at least ask the question & research. I also don’t pay for long term, multi-year deals anymore (I had about six months remaining on my PIA deal when I “noped” out of being a part of Kape’s acquisition), but I still try not to be an idiot and just give away money either. As an example, I buy the Mullvad gift card, with a scratch-off code from Amazon, $29/6mo ($4.83/mo) or $57/12mo ($4.75/mo). No euro exchange rate or transactions fees, etc. My preference is to incentivize my favorite companies to stay in business, providing the service and continual upgrades that I want and expect, like the following:
-and-
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/moving-our-encrypted-dns-servers-to-run-in-ram
When people talk about “zero logs,” I’m not aware of anything better than having everything run through RAM. Going out to lunch/dinner or watching a movie is roughly $10 to $20/person these days. I’ll happily pay a couple extra bucks a month for a VPN with this kind of privacy and continual upgrade in service, or from the other three I mentioned (and I believe Mullvad is still even the least expensive of the four). No criticism from me on your choices though.
I have qBit bound to my VPN (Nord), but it basically stops every few minutes. So I had to stop and use killswitch.
This, I think, is actually an issue with qBit. But maybe it only ever happens to me.
every few minutes is a lot. havent been on nord for a few years but even when i was on them i dont remember getting drops that frequently. i suspect it is likely not an issue with qbit as many others use it without running into drops like that - including myself.
probably an issue with either nord or your isp. if you are on wifi, there are also some routeres with known issues when it comes to dropping wifi signal - but there’s too many different models and firmware versions to really guess this accurately without detailed info (and sometimes it only happens in specific versions of firmware on specific routers).
i get occasional drops on PIA but its usually after running for something like 3-7 days straight. i’m not using the official pia client app but instead download manual ovpn file configurations from pia and import them into generic client. under windows, you need the openvpn free community client for this. under linux, you can import them into networkmanager. iirc, nord has manual ovpn files too but they make you select a specific server and download 1 config file at a time.
alternately, if you setup wireguard that might also work better but haven’t tested myself
I used Nord proxies when I still used uTorrent, never had issues. I’m definitely hardwired, and my isp is shit, don’t get me wrong, but the only change I can see is qBit and proxies. I tried every server they had available, and the issue just stops when I don’t use their proxies. Maybe I should try proxies from some other service, but I’m not really in a place to shop around… and I don’t know that free vpn services have proxies that you can try.
I also say “stops every few minutes”, I should clarify, it stops and doesn’t resume. I have to close qbit and reopen.
I don’t know enough about ovpn or wireguard to know how that would help me… Is that not a VPN/tunneling that you have to have both sides to use? So I would go to a server that has another VPN running on anyways?
I don’t know enough about ovpn or wireguard to know how that would help me…
OpenVPN and Wireguard are different protocols that VPN providers can use. Technically, there are also groups and client apps of the same name for both too. I think there are other protocols too (pretty sure there’s one called IPsec and maybe some others) but OpenVPN and Wireguard are 2 of the most common. Wireguard is newer and generally is regarded as faster than OpenVPN protocol but there are some privacy issues with it if using the unmodified version. Some VPN companies use a modified version of WG that address those issues (Nord and PIA). But since customers can’t inspect the server configs, I would definitely recommend only using VPN companies that have undergone a third party audit to confirm that they keep no logs and have a server configuration without privacy issues (off my head: PIA, Nord, Mullvad, expressvpn, surfshark, cyberghost).
Is that not a VPN/tunneling that you have to have both sides to use?
Yes, if your VPN provider doesn’t have servers configured with Wireguard, then you can’t use it. And even if they do, it probably won’t be all the servers so you need to choose one with it. So if say your provider was Nord. Nord calls their modified WG as “NordLynx”.
If you wanted to connect to Nord’s WG (aka NordLynx) servers, AFAIK you have to use the official Nord client app. Some providers might release a WG config file that you could use to manually set it up but last time I checked Nord only offers manual config files for OpenVPN (here’s an old reddit thread basically saying the same thing). This is annoying if you are trying to have a setup where you can switch between multiple providers and protocols easily (like me) or in places where you can’t install client software (like routers) but probably not a big deal to most users connecting from a computer/tablet/phone/etc.
For PIA, it is similar although they don’t rename their Wireguard as something else. But again, they don’t provide manual WG configs and you have to use their official app to use it. However, they do have some github repos and more technical users can run some scripts to generate temporary manual configs (my understanding is that unlike the OpenVPN manual configs, these will eventually expire and you will need to rerun the scripts again at some later time).
I used Nord proxies when I still used uTorrent, never had issues. I’m definitely hardwired, and my isp is shit, don’t get me wrong, but the only change I can see is qBit and proxies. I tried every server they had available, and the issue just stops when I don’t use their proxies. Maybe I should try proxies from some other service, but I’m not really in a place to shop around… and I don’t know that free vpn services have proxies that you can try.
Not sure. Hard to debug without concrete details and I’m probably not the best for that anyway. Could be proxies; I connect to vpn servers but not via socks proxies so not sure how those are different speed wise.
If not that, could be qbit settings or version (several years ago some various builds of qbit could be hit or miss but I thought that was more or less done with nowadays). If you are interested in working it out, my recommendation would be to take some screenshots of qbit settings. Then create a post asking about improving qbit speeds and also list a) who the vpn provider is - nord or whatever you use now, b) how you are connecting - nord app or proxy url etc, c) if you are testing with same torrent in each, then what kind of approx numbers you are seeing in qbit and what you expect based on network test. That would probaby be enough info for folks to help you get it sorted and would be a good resource for anybody else having similar troubles.
Excellent info. Thank you!
You didn’t even mention QBittorrent’s best feature: it has a search engine that searches across lots of different torrent sites, so you don’t need to check each one!
Wait, really? I’m going to have to go check next time I log into my torrenting box.
IIRC you have to enable it separately, but it’s not very difficult to do. Just google it if you run into trouble
I agree that that is a very nice feature. So are the rss feeds.
But to me “best” is anything that makes it easier to avoid getting caught so the network interface binding is still my favorite 😉
If only qbittorrent hadn’t had that idiotic redesign that made it look like a fisherprice toy.
not really sure what you mean (maybe i didnt notice or it was before i started using it?) but to each their own I guess?
Any setup required? I tried it out and my speeds were in the tens of megabits max. Pretty sure nothing was capped in settings.
Maybe? Been awhile since I’ve messed with my setup and while I don’t like slow, I prioritize security over speed so my settings might not be what you want anyway. so I’d recommend just looking up a guide; it is an extremely popular torrent client and there should be tons of guides out there. Or if you not sure which guide to use, just create a new post here - lot of people use it and probably have set it up from scratch more recently than me. I know some people say to open ports on the router but i’ve never liked the idea (I view it as less secure) but some people swear by it.
I can recommend that you test the following:
- make sure you are using a VPN server that isn’t too far away. If you were in say San Franciso and selecting a VPN in New York or Europe, your speeds will be less than if you selected one in Seattle or Los Angeles
- do a speed test off your vpn vs on it (e.g. speedtest.net). ALL VPNs will be slower than regular non-VPN due to the encryption and having less hops. But you can see how much difference it makes when you switch servers and if you have more than one VPN service, then you can find servers in the same city for both and compare which service is faster.
- If your VPN has a modified WireGuard service (PIA and Nord both do IIRC), then that should be faster. I say modified bc the unaltered Wireguard spec has a privacy red flags so if you have a VPN service that offers it, make sure you read up or at least skim some reviews and whatnot to make sure they handled those issues that in a way that doesn’t leave your identity exposed. PIA and Nord both did that (I think Nord’s was called something else not actually WG but idr).
- make sure you do your testing on popular torrents - but if it is anything you could get in trouble for, then you should do all the leak tests I mentioned above FIRST. Only mentioning, bc I had a friend that was testing his shit on some obscure thing he was looking for and saying it was slow but when i helped him configure his settings, we tested with something popular (i think whatever the current hottest show was) and he was actually getting a lot better speeds than he thought.
edit: just searched on dbzer0 and wasn’t seeing much on this. I did find a reddit post and a makeuseof guide that both mention stuff about improving speed. For the reddit one, I think the patched exe they are talking about is likely a dev build and since that was from a few years ago, whatever fix is probably already merged in and no longer needed. will compare the other settings vs mine and post back
edit2: are are the differences i have from the guide:
- makeuseof has (Tools > Options > Speed) “Upload and download rate limits are set to infinity by default, and it’s recommended not to tinker with these limits. Most often, users limit the upload rate to save bandwidth and get faster download rates, but the torrent client’s choking mechanism compromises download rates when upload rates are limited, making the download process much slower.” - on mine, i had infinite down and was restricting upload. But I kind of think MUO’s advice is better and increased my upload amount. Mine was 100 KiB/s, now 1000 KiB/s. Only reason I don’t put it on infinite is I am on a capped internet and tend to leave my downloaded stuff around for sharing so I want to avoid uploads consuming too much of my monthly bandwidth and I don’t leave my client running 24/7 so not sure how reliable bandwidth settings are.
- makeuseof has (Tools > Options > BitTorrent) "In the dropdown menu next to Encryption mode, select Allow Encryption. " but on mine I have it as “required Encryption” - probably this would make mine slower than the suggestion tho
- Tools > Options > Connection settings I have “TCP and uTP” (same as MUO) but that old reddit thread was recommending only TCP.
- MUO has (Tools > Options > Connections) : "Ensure the box beside Use UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router is checked. " - as I mentioned, I don’t do port forwarding so I leave mine unchecked but there is probably a speed hit for this.
- There was also something about "Don’t download multiple torrent files at the same time. This will then allocate all available bandwidth to downloading a single file, resulting in a faster download. " - I generally ignore this but there IS some truth to it. I have had hundreds of things queued before and gotten awful speeds. I recommend just not going overboard with how many you are running at once.
- Tools > Options > Advanced: Find the network interface and select the one that corresponds with your VPN. If you aren’t sure, for most Windows users you can connect to VPN then find from command line using
ipconfig /alland look for something that is NOT disconnected and probably hasTAP-Windows Adapter Vxif using OpenVPN-Protocol (most VPNs) but might be different for wireguard. For Linux users, to show network interfaces runip -4 -o -br addr- usually in linux ethernet interfaces start with anEand wifi interfaces start with aW,lois localhost, and 99% of the time the vpn interface will be namedtun0if you are using a VPN with OpenVPN-protocol (most of them) but might be something different for wireguard or if you have customized things.
People still use that malware of a client???
uTorrent 2.2.1 Build 25154 is good. There’s a few builds of uTorrent that are fine.
But yeah, qbittorrent is the default “why didn’t you use it?” client.
It’s good in the sense that it’s the last version before it got enshittified by ads, but the now nearly-legendary v2.2.1 is also 5 years behind in security patches. It was an awesome, fast, stable client and I miss it, but I don’t think it’s worth the risk. Like you and everyone else has been saying, OP should be using Qbittorent.
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Which would your suggest? It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do a little pirating.
qBitTorrent is one of the standard clients.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go after this is all done downloading.
Tixati, Deluge and Transmission are also good, modern clients
KTorrent
Tixati
A lot of the private trackers I use specifically block its usage.
You really shouldn’t use uTorrent. There are a number of safer and better open source alternatives out there.
Which would you suggest?
Qbittorrent is my favorite client but there are a couple of great alternatives like Transmission or Deluge.
Can confirm Transmission and Deluge are both solid
since you seem familiar with those clients, do you know if either or both of those have a network interface bind feature like qbittorrent? (if not familar, qbit lets you pick which interface your vpn uses and only torrent on that one - which is damn handy if your vpn drops)
i used to use deluge back in the day (years ago) but ended up switching to qbit after i got a dcma when my vpn dropped. i’ve since improved my setup and safeguards a lot but was wondering if it ever got a similar feature.
They don’t. I use Deluge inside a Docker container and route that container’s networking through another container running Gluetun. This way all traffic flowing to and from the Deluge container necessarily goes through my VPN, not counting the couple of ports exposed outside the container so that the web UI works.
So, not a Deluge feature, but I enjoy how much control the more modular setup gets me.
Interesting. I’m still on a VM setup and still need to migrate everything over to using docker (or podman). I had made an attempt a year or so back but wanted to run all my containers without root and whatever one I was using as a template at the time had been expecting the opposite. Then life caught up with me and I ran out of time on that project
But good to know about Gluetun. Maybe I’ll revisit the migration to containers at some point if I get the free time.
Sure, that makes sense. Honestly, IMO you should use whatever stack works well and is convenient for you to keep updated. If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.
Radar and sonarr would just automatically upgrade those for you. No need to mass delete and redownload.
Enlighten us smooth brains.
Install them, point them to your media folder, tell them what your preferred quality level is, and they’ll handle everything else.
The Trash Guides are probably the best resource to get running.
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Yup, it’s called Lidarr. It isn’t quite as nice as the tools for movies/TV, but it gets the job done.
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Radar and Sonarr are tools to track movies and TV shows respectively. You can add a movie/show to track, tell it the quality you want it in, and set up Prowlarr or Jackett to give Son/Radarr the access to the torrent trackers it needs. You can also use Usenet but I have no experience there.
It will search those torrent trackers for releases matching your movies/shows in the quality and language you set for them and send the downloads to the torrent client you set up. When the client finishes downloading, Son/Radarr copies (or hardlinks) the files to your library folders.
If Son/Radarr is tracking a show that you currently have downloaded in 480p, but the quality profile allows upgrades up to 1080p, it will search for 720p and 1080p releases and pick the best match it can find. When the torrent client finishes downloading it, Son/Radarr will automatically replace the 480p release with the 1080p release it just downloaded.
You have triggered me by mentioning uTorrent.
My apologies. I’ll be discontinuing it’s use after this project is done.
Pardon me for living under a rock, but what’s wrong with uTorrent?
Its installer comes bundled with bloatware, several years ago even having included a bitcoin miner in one of their releases.
uTorrent 2.2.1 foreverrrrrr
…but yea at this point you should have moved on by now
Pretty easy to do with just 500 fies. That’s just 2/3 of the Simpsons.
I have all Simpsons, at max res as they released them! Same with Family Guy, South Park and Robot Chicken (RIP).
Also replaced all my movies that I watch on repeat often to 4K.
I have no idea how much data I used, and don’t care. USENET rocks!
How many gigs is all of Simpsons?
152 GB in my drives
There are only 10 seasons of The Simpsons and I won’t have it any other way!
Only about half of OnePiece
K
Should probably switch to qbtorrent. What VPN are you using?
NordVPN. Is that a good one?
Umm from my understanding they handed over their users data some years ago. I think the authorities might’ve asked, you may have to google that.
I’ve been using Mullvad, it’s like $5/mo and their servers are fast. They have servers all over the world. Mullvad did away with port forwarding. This article favors Nordvpn but it depends what your needs are
https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/nordvpn-vs-mullvad-vpn-comparison/
Edit 1, they do comply with law enforcement https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
Whether or not they comply with law enforcement is not the issue. Any company will comply with their local law enforcement if they want to keep their doors open. What’s important is what data they keep on their users. Unless I’m mistaken, Nord, like many others, only keeps billing info and limited connection info for load balancing purposes (deleted after something like 15-minutes). So, the Panamanian government (where they’re headquartered); who IIRC has no data retention laws and isn’t part of 5-eyes; asks for logs, they will get something, but not much to tie a specific customer to anything.
Also, Nord has been independently audited multiple times in the past. Something quite a few other providers can’t say.
It’s popular to bash on Nord b/c they advertise a lot, but I haven’t seen a legit reason not to use them. If it exists, I’d love to see it.
Isn’t the real problem if they comply with mega conglomerate corporations?
I’m not worried that FBI has my data. They guaranteed already have all of it.
I just don’t want the house of mouse taking my home because I stole checks notes Shrek 4: The Shrekening
Yea I was using Boleh VPN at one point and somehow got caught with Avatar the way of the water.
My VPN might’ve turned off and I didn’t know. Switched to Mullvad and haven’t had no issues.
I just played it off that something might be wrong with my modem or router and will replace it soon. But I make sure I’m connected the whole time.
They check the boxes for log and data retention but they are a trashy organization. Skim their terms of service which states that security and uptime are not guaranteed. Support is a 36 hour turn around and they will hamstring you out of the 30 day return policy. Their client is absolute garbage with built in features to cause you to leak. I leaked twice in the first 2 months. Highly discourage them, but they are a soulless organization checking minimum requirements.
If it is for piracy - I have used Nord VPN for 6+ years now because it’s like 2 years for $100 and I am just fine. I have never received a letter, or an email about piracy.
As always check for a DNS leak and if possible setup a VPN kill switch (built-in Nord), or use Qbitorrent (my choice) which has its own kill switch.
If you want a VPN for more nefarious purposes I can’t, and wouldn’t help with that.
I’ve got the Killswitch set up. How do I check for DNS leak?
https://dnsleaktest.com/ confirm that you are not identifiable from that information.
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Which do you use?
I hope this is a sarcasm, lol
Instead of being toxic, why not help educate other users on why NordVPN should be avoided.
It’s not. I need more knowledge.
Don’t listen to those other comments till they bring a source for their claim that nordvpn logs.
Here’s a source that NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times: https://nordvpn.com/blog/nordvpn-no-logs-audit-2022/
Ah, well my apologies, I made the incorrect assumption that it was. I’m headed to bed at the moment, so I apologize for the short explanation, I’ll try to come back with better facts and sources, but the short of it is that when you use a VPN, you’re effectively shifting trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. Trust that your data is not being mishandled, misused, is secured, and is not being used for further profits. If a VPN provider logs heavily and has a police raid or a subpoena, your data is still freely accessible. In all fairness, in using NordVPN, your traffic is still encrypted over the network, further securing you from attacks, but they tend to lean very log-heavy, and if I remember right, have had some security issues in the past, though don’t quote me on that, I want to come back more researched. Generally speaking, the consensus on Lemmy has been in favor of Mullivad since they log nothing and can even take anynomous payment, on top of being a very affordable VPN. Sorry again for my incorrect assumption regarding sarcasm, I’m used to a lot of hardcore privacy nerds on here. You’re better off with NordVPN than without is the fact of the matter, and good on you if you’re making use of it 😁
NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times though?
Well I’ll be damned, I trusted the hivemind on privacy communities on Lemmy and was needlessly jaded against a good service. I’ll stick my foot in my mouth.
Despite what the hiveminds on lemmy/reddit piracy forums think because of all the advertising Nord does, it’s actually a really great vpn. It lacks port forwarding, but it has one of the best audited no logs policies, accepts crypto and cash, and is on the very small list of VPN providers that Arch Wiki has a page about.
I would say nord is not considered privacy respecting. At least not in the way things like mullvad or proton are?
Will nord or express work for pirating yes, are they actually private, we don’t really know.
Companies like mullvad offer no logging vpn whereas nord makes no such promise.
I honestly don’t know too much about nord but i think that’s the gyst of it
NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times though?
I raw dog my torrents with no VPN
Can someone tell me the actual risks involved? I always thought it was so you didn’t get your ISP up your ass and shut you off, my power company is my ISP and they don’t give a shit
What really am I risking here?
Edit: US
Depends where you live. In some countries nothing. In other countries fines. In some death penalty.
Me, Germany, 20 years of no VPN = nothing ever happend Friend of me, also germany, downloads Minecraft once without VPN = 800€ cease and desist letter So yeah. Pretty much a gamble.
One of three things, one your ISP doesn’t give a shit and nothing happens. Two, you get nasty-grams telling you to cease or have your service cut, three your information gets forwarded to the copyright owners company and you possibly are fined or worse brought in by a lawsuit.
Yep, yep and yep. The nasty-grams are typically referred to as “love letters”.
Depends on where you are. Depending on country it can range from no one giving a shit, over to getting letters from your ISP, over to getting smaller fines, up to getting railed for your life.
And all of that wouldnt be possible if you legally purchased all of this
Where can you forever-download these movies with no DRM?
You rip the physical media.
Do you always rip it at max quality, indefinitely keep the physical copy, or repurchase it years later when you want higher quality?
Depends.
I only rip music cds as the file size isnt as big as with DVDs or BDs.
But I keep them indefinitely.
Sonarr/Radarr will do this for you automagically for most TV and Movies, never have to visit a dodgy torrent site again.
Started setting it up years ago and over time re-downloaded all those shitty yify rips with full fat bluray remuxes wherever available and the highest quality possible otherwise. Hit 100tb pretty quickly lol.
I have my rig set up to automatically upgrade to bluray remuxes when available, then once they are older than 1 month and over a certain filesize they get automatically compressed with a fairly slow, low crf H265-10bit encode with FileFlows to cut their size roughly in half while still being visually perfect on the normal TVs, all 4k content stays untouched for the main theatre.
What do you use for storage?
mostly unraid, some ZFS ontop for high priority storage, a couple of TB of SSDs on top of that for caching and ingest.
Just added it all up, its 110TB at the moment, with another 16tb to add in a couple of weeks.
How much did that setup cost you?
Not sure it’s more than 10years of slow upgrades. Nothing compared to the true datahoarders out there
Too much probably.
If I was to rebuild it from scratch with new parts but equivalent performance and capacity it owuld only be a couple of grand honestly…
my AV distro gear on the other hand… oof… decent small car money, and a terrible investment.
You’re crazy and I envy your setup so much.
I’m just starting, with a mere 4 TB storage, but I want to learn how it works before investing more money
That’s why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.
I’ll support this
If your goal is to set up a media server, a few services, and a storage for non-essential files*, it is hard to beat unraid. Free is obviously better, but it has the best support for mismatched drive sizes and, arguably, the highest percentage of “usable” space. Try to wait for a sale (there are quite a few per year) but it is also a lifetime license so…
There are performance implications and I never trust any solution that can only survive two drive failures. Especially when recovery involves heavy reads and writes. Because drives tend to fail in groups and stressing a drive on its last legs is never a good idea.
*: Which, to be fair, should be how any locally stored file is treated. Unless you have it backed up off site in at least one location (preferably two), it is not backed up. Which is why my media collection is YOLO but my (encrypted) documents and personal photos go into a cloud storage bucket on a weekly basis.
I was thinking of YOLOing my media collection too, but at the same time I’m scared of downloading lots of things and then losing everything and having to download everything from scratch again.
Yeah. For me, the vast majority of my media collection are rips of the blu-rays and DVDs I have in a box in the closet. So recovery is just annoying. There are a few somewhat obscure shows (or shows with massively generic or reused names) that I might never be able to find again but… whatever.
But I definitely have a few porn videos I found on DC++ ten (… twenty?) years ago that I have never been able to find again after accidentally deleting the “Special Textures” folder of my Unreal Tournament directory.
Unraid pro is expensive (compared to free DIY linux or Truenas for example) but it is extremely flexible and very easy to get started with.
Their free trial is very flexible though, and once set up and running most people will already be set and happy to pay for the licence.
Anyone not building a proper rackmount server is unlikely to need more than Unraid Plus. Which is 89 USD without a discount. Said discounts vary but are generally 20-30% or straight up 10 dollars, which gets plus down to 60-70 bucks. Unraid Pro I think is where you start getting into discussions of if this is a good decision, but we are looking at 90-110 for that.
Which is not nothing. But Plus undiscounted is about the price of a 4 TB drive. So if you can’t afford a license you can’t really afford to run a NAS with any degree of recoverability. At which point you are probably better mounting the drives as individual un-RAID’d drives and spreading files across a file system. Because, at that point, you can’t recover from any failures anyway and this at least still guarantees access to your remaining files if one or more drives drop.
And if you are going big enough to need more than 12 drives in a single system (and I say this as someone who currently has 16 in his NAS…): That is when you should not be using unraid. Multiple physical servers set up as a ceph array and dealing with a lot of smaller zfs raids of varying sizes is the way to go but… you are losing a lot of storage to parity for something that likely isn’t worth that level of redundancy. But you also start getting into a discussion of “what is my time worth” at that point because… Ceph is a mother fucker.
What is your general setup? Do you have a server with everything in docker running? On top of proxmox or OS? It then backups to unraid or do you only use the unraid for everything?
I’m on my way in setting up home server with storage for a few services but still in planning
Most of it just runs on my unraid box, bunch of Docker containers and a vm for a couple of windows apps I needed running. I also run a small secondary proxmox server with some home automation amd networking stuff that I wanted to stay online when the server is off-line for updates or maintenance.
that would take me awhile. im up to ~30,000 episodes of ‘shows’ and 2,500 movies
ive been recently doing the same…grabbing the 4k versions of stuff that matters.
my fav config is gluetun+deluge for a containerized seedbox
What kind of storage do you use?
i have a main server stuffed with drives (hot use), which is backed up to a nas, which is replicated to a cold nas. ~20tb x 3 for redundancy. 6x4tb arrays at the moment
Jesus fuck!
‘data hoarder’
i have this weird problem with streaming… i dont ever want to rely on someone elses.
Don’t radarr and sonarr download better versions automatically? Seems these measures were drastic.
It’s been a while since I’ve used those. I didn’t want duplicates of everything either, so I decided to start over.
Duplicates aren’t an issue. Doing this sort of upgrade without radarr/sonarr is just silly.
Duplicates may not be an issue for you, but they are for me. First off, I have limited storage. Secondly I want my Plex library to be nice and tidy.
I meant if you use sonarr/radarr, it doesn’t create duplicates by design.
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That’s the neat thing about the internet. Nobody had the expertise needed to do lots of things until they started to learn how…and all the information you need’s right there, just waiting for folks to go find it and learn from it.
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I must have read something because I replied to it. What made you think I had some fortune tellers knowledge of OPs expertise.
I’m keeping my original pirates of Mr. Robot for posterity
did they censor new versions of the show or something?
I don’t think so, but I got the entire series as it was aired, ripped straight from over-the-air HD transmissions complete with chyrons in the lower third for some Newfoundland TV station.
