Stop Seeding After Torrent Download Finishes

If you’re running your torrent downloads overnight, you may want the torrent to automatically stop seeding once the download is finished. This could be for a variety of reasons such as a bandwidth cap, power consumption, or legal issues.

The easiest way to do this is as follows:

1. Select ‘Tools‘ on the menu at the top
2. Change ‘On Downloads Done‘ to ‘Exit qBittorrent‘

This will close qBittorrent once it has finished, meaning the torrents will stop seeding once completed.

If you’re looking to delete the .torrent files once the download has finished:

1. Open Options (ALT+O or Tools -> Options)
2. Go to ‘Downloads‘
3. Tick the fourth checkbox (‘Delete .torrent files afterwards‘)

Note that this gives a warning of ‘Data loss possible‘, but it should be fine as the torrent should load everything it needs into the program when you first load it.

If you use uTorrent, I would strongly recommend switching over to qBittorrent, which allows this functionality. uTorrent is also closed-source and shows adverts, whereas qBittorrent is open-source and does not show adverts.

If you’re looking to further optimise your qBittorrent usage, read this guide on setting up your torrent queue settings and download priority.

Additional Methods

There are additional settings you can change to make it so you do not auto-seed, which is particularly useful if you want your BitTorrent client to stay open whilst it downloads other files (without draining your bandwidth when seeding). This does go against the principles of torrenting, but that is your personal decision to make. Here’s what you can do:

1. Open the options menu (ALT+O or Tools -> Options)
2. Open ‘BitTorrent‘ on the left hand side
3. Under ‘Seeding Limits‘, enable ‘When ratio reaches‘ and change it to ‘0.00‘
4. You can also change ‘When seeding time reaches‘ to ‘0 min‘ and then the dropdown box to ‘Remove torrent‘ to make it remove the torrent once download completes (you may need to change it to 1 minute if 0 doesn’t work)

In addition to this, if you really want to cover yourself and make sure you do not auto-seed, you can change the following settings (although the above should be sufficient):

1. Open the options menu (ALT+O or Tools -> Options)
2. Select ‘Connection‘ on the left hand side
3. Change ‘Global maximum number of upload slots‘ and ‘Maximum number of upload slots per torrent’ to ‘0’
4. Select ‘Speed‘ and change the ‘Global Rate Limits’ upload option to ‘1’ (note this may limit your download speed)

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps you set up your torrent client in the way that suits your needs. As mentioned above, downloading and not giving back by uploading is generally frowned upon and goes against the principles of torrenting; however, people have their reasons for doing so, usually relating to performance/billing/legal aspects.

If this helped you and you are in the fortunate position of being able to give something back, I appreciate any number of coffees that you may be able to buy for me!