How to Download Torrents When Blocked in Office, School or Work
There are situations when you would like to download torrents when blocked in office, school or workplace. Most organisations have firewall and other software running in their network which prevents you from downloading torrent files from their network connection. If you are using a shared network connection in a hotel, mess, hostel or someplace else, chances are Bittorrent files are blocked from downloading and you can’t download movies, songs, games and other content from uTorrent or other Bittorrent clients.
In this tutorial we will learn an alternative way to download torrent files when they are blocked in your Wifi network or firewall. No we will not be using a VPN service to download torrents when blocked in network. The trick here is to use a service which is allowed by most organisations – Google Drive.
Most companies, schools or workplaces use Google drive for managing office documents, spreadsheets, word documents and hence uploads and downloads from drive.google.com is allowed. This is because if the domain drive.google.com is blocked, then it will severely hamper the productivity of office workers or members of the organisation. You can use this to your advantage and remotely download torrent files to your computer using Google drive as a stop over point.
You will need two cloud services to remotely download torrent files to your computer’s hard drive when they are blocked in the network which you are using
- Google Drive Storage – The basic account of 15GB storage is free and ships out of the box with your Gmail account. If you have a Gmail email address, you have a free Google Drive account as well with 15GB of storage.
- Offcloud – Offcloud is a cloud storage provider which let’s you remotely upload any file or download link to your cloud storage account. You can use Offcloud to remotely upload files to your Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon cloud drive, Microsoft One drive, FTP account, without having to download the file to your computer first.
Offcloud acts essentially as a cloud-based Torrent client in order that you can fetch data from the BitTorrent network, without compromising your privacy or network performance.
How to download torrent files when they are blocked in Network?
The best part is that you don’t even need to install uTorrent or any other Bittorrent software in your computer and technically, you will not be downloading torrents from all the peers. You will be downloading a file from your Google account while Offcloud will download the torrent file to your Google account.
Here are the steps you need to follow.
- First install Google Drive’s back up and Sync in your computer and select the location of the folder which will sync with your Google Drive account. It can be your computer’s hard drive or it can be an external hard disk.
For example, I have purchased 100GB space with Google Drive and I use it to backup all my photos, documents, work related files and everything else except movies and videos. I have installed Google Drive in my computer but the folder I have selected is the one of my external hard drive (1TB capacity). This is because I want my external hard drive to contain all the documents and files, just in case I may need them to use it on another computer.
- Now decide the location of the folder which will sync with Google drive. What is the total amount of files you will be downloading. If it’s just a small file or a couple of gigabytes, you can store it in your computer’s hard drive. However, if you would be downloading lots of movies, games, songs and other things on a regular basis, then you should choose the external hard disk.
- Once you have setup Google Drive in your computer, create a free account with Offcloud.
- Login to your free Offcloud account, go to “Account” and add your Google Drive account as a “Remote account”.
- One Google Drive is authenticated, you are ready to roll. Go to the “Remote” page, add the torrent magnet link and click on “Upload”.
- Offcloud will get to work and it will download the torrent file to it’s own server first and then it will transfer the file to your Google Drive account. You will be able to see the status of the download in your Offcloud account, when it completes.
It usually takes around 8 -10 hours for the download to finish and the file to appear in your Google Drive account.
- Once the download has finished, just open your Google Drive account and you should be able to see that file there.
- The last step is to simply let the Google Drive client run in your office, school or workplace where you want to download the file. Google Drive will automatically download the movie to your computer’s hard drive or to your external hard drive when the sync is ON, so all you need to do now is go to work, turn on Google Drive and forget about it.
Most workplaces have pretty fast internet connections, with speeds upto few hundred MBPS so it shouldn’t take much time to download a 1GB movie file to your computer via Google Drive. I tested it out in my workplace and it took me less than an hour to download a movie file from Google Drive to my external hard drive through Google Drive sync.
Is there any Limit on the number of files you can download or Bandwidth limitations
Well of course there will be limitations to Offcloud’s offerings if you are a Free user.
The Free account let’s you process upto 3 downloads or 10 GB of bandwidth for free. If you want to download unlimited files and bandwidth per month, you will need to upgrade to the premium plan ($10 a month and $60 a year).
The premium plan of Offcloud has no such limitations on file count and bandwidth usage. You can download unlimited files and enjoy unlimited bandwidth for $10 a month, which I would say is pretty economical if you download lots of stuff from the internet on a regular basis.
One of the things you can do is make a list of all the download links, torrent magnet links and everything which you want to download into a text file. Next, upgrade to the paid plan for one month, add all the links, download everything and then downgrade to the Free plan before renewal. That way, you cleared up your download queue