Miray Forum

http://download.utorrent.com/beta/utorrent-3.0-beta-falcon-25220.upx.exe

HDClone is a great product and is the fastest way to backup as well as defrag my system drive onto an external eSATA drive.

My issue is that when I image back from the file on my external drive, I have to reinstall µTorrent every time. Not a big deal but what file(s) are getting corrupted by my imaging from a HDClone backup image? It is only µTorrent that is being affected by this all other files and the overall health of the system drive is unaffected. If you could please download the latest µTorrent build linked above and test for yourself to please confirm. Thanks in advance!

It has to do with how the files are stored. They are so called sparse-files, where the not-yet-written-to blocks are only virtually reserved, but not yet allocated on disk. If you click on properties for such a file, you'll see a size of say 100,000,000 B, and an on-disk-size of only 5,000,000 Bytes, the rest is all Zeros.

When µTorrent continues to download the file, the remaining bits are filled up, until the file is no sparse file anymore.

When Imaging (and defragmenting), sparse files can under certain circumstances get corrupted, that's because of the way sparse files are stored with NTFS.

We are working on a solution for this (to have full compatibility with sparse files also in these cases). One way for you to mend this problem is to tell µTorrent to not use sparse files, but allocated the full size of the file at the beginning of the download process. Depending on the sources of the torrent, this will also lead to less fragmentation of the file. (in µTorrent the option diskio.no_zero must be OFF, diskio.sparse_files must also be OFF)