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BitTorrent can be an efficient way to "host" a large data set that are static. Also, BitTorrent is a good mechanism distribute a large data set as part of a open data project without funding or official government recognition. As mentioned here:

Depending on the level of interest, you might find it difficult to retain seeders.

If a person has ample disk space and bandwidth, what are some open data torrents to seed for the greater good of the community? It would be helpful to include links to description, purpose, and compressed/uncompressed file size.

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    great question. i'm only aware of one virginia tech was serving up; it had very little life -> "Depending on the level of interest, you might find it difficult to retain seeders." very niche. also very helpful.
    – albert
    Commented Nov 25, 2014 at 16:53
  • I list 3 sites in a question that I asked a while back : opendata.stackexchange.com/q/283/263
    – Joe
    Commented Nov 25, 2014 at 19:07
  • Thanks @Joe. Link 1 is a good example, can't find torrent for link 2, and link 3 only has one data set with torrents
    – philshem
    Commented Nov 25, 2014 at 19:12
  • @albert do you have a link to the VT one?
    – philshem
    Commented Nov 26, 2014 at 14:43
  • 1
    @albert Please post other ones in the wiki below
    – philshem
    Commented Nov 27, 2014 at 18:31

2 Answers 2

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Community wiki to collect data sets available to download/seed on bit torrent


  • DNS Census, the DNS registration dataset snapshot taken in 2013 (compressed ~15GB and uncompressed 157GB).

The DNS Census 2013 is an attempt to provide a public dataset of registered domains and DNS records. It was inspired by the Internet Census 2012 which showed that releasing data anonymously via BitTorrent is a good thing to do. The dataset contains about 2.5 billion DNS records gathered in the years 2012-2013.

All data is compressed using xz/LZMA2.

DNS records are written into CSV files. There is one file for each DNS record type (A/AAAA/CNAME/DNAME/MX/NS/SOA/TXT). The records are sorted lexicographically by hostname and by time.


Fare data looks like this, showing medallion, hack_license, vendor_id, pickup date/time, payment type, fare, tip amount (look at all those zeros!), tolls, and total.

Trip data (the good stuff!) looks like this. Each file has about 14 million rows, and each row contains medallion, hack license, vendor id, rate code, store and forward flag, pickup date/time dropoff date/time, passenger count, trip time in seconds, trip distance, and latitude/longitude coordinates for the pickup and dropoff locations.


Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.


The Combined Online Information System (COINS) is the database for UK Government expenditure. The data is used to produce expenditure data in the Budget report; Supply Estimates; Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA); Whole of Government Accounts (WGA); the monthly Public Sector Finance Releases. It is also used by the ONS for other National Statistics releases.


This service is designed to facilitate storage of all the data used in research, including datasets as well as publications. There are many advantages of using bittorrent technology to disseminate this work.


  • 911datasets - (3,254 GB) (3 TB) in 256,673 files (as of 31 Dec 2014)

Crowdsourcing 9/11 information distribution.

The idea behind 911datasets.org is to make raw information about 9/11 available to a broad audience, and to provide a way to ask useful questions about the data.

Most of the material was obtained using the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) process.

Link to all torrents


+ Wikileaks data storage - wlstorage.net

You can either download everything, or select files by "project", as folders or single files: torrents (1827 in total at time of posting).

More details here


While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

Full data download

Hilbert Browser tool

Image gallery

(Taken from this answer)


Sci-Hub is a paywall-bypassing website that uses "shared" user credentials to provide PDF or HTML scientific papers. The website itself doesn't store any papers. Answer from this open data stack exchange question.

Collection of more than 1 million books.

Collection of more than 50 million scientific papers.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study.


This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period in 2009, before Yahoo! shut down geocities.com on October 26th, 2009. This collection is compressed in a UNIX filesystem with both 7zip archives and tape archives (gtar).


This is an unofficial listing of Wikimedia data dump torrents, dumps of Wikimedia site content distributed using BitTorrent...

This includes both dumps already being distributed at dumps.wikimedia.org and dumps created and distributed solely by others.

BitTorrent is not officially used to distribute Wikimedia dumps; this article lists user-created torrents. Please protect your computer and verify the md5sum for any file downloaded from these unofficial mirrors.

In particular, Wikidata


The GHTorrent project

GHTorrent monitors the Github public event time line. For each event, it retrieves its contents and their dependencies, exhaustively. It then stores the raw JSON responses to a MongoDB database, while also extracting their structure in a MySQL database.

Currently (Jan 2015), MongoDB stores around 4TB of JSON data (compressed), while MySQL more than 1.5 billion rows of extracted metadata. A large part of the activity of 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 has been retrieved, while we are also going backwards to retrieve the full recorded history of important projects.

Since 2015, the dumps are daily as mysql format

Downloads: http://ghtorrent.org/downloads.html


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Star Wars Kid Meme data dump - data is a subset of Apache server logs (2003-04-10--2003-11-26) covering the post and subsequent posts that went "viral" across the web. at 1.6gb uncompressed, the author decided to torrent it:
Star Wars Kid: The Data Dump
waxy.org torrent (404s)
EDIT UPDATE:
waxy.org torrent via Wayback Machine

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    Even if torrent file is in Internet Archive, tracker does not work any longer, so there is no way to find any seeders
    – Antonio
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 12:00
  • great point...if there are no seeders, it no longer lives. i downloaded it just now and its actively trying to connect to 2 seeders....though nothing has happened. will report back about this particular instance.
    – albert
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 15:43
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    if you have this zip file still, you can just share it through any other torrent tracker. And it will be much appreciated.
    – Antonio
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 18:22
  • lol, if i had it i would already be sharing it. but i hear ya!
    – albert
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 20:08

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