How do you get Limewire to resume a partial download? I have not been successful, but can do it all the time in Bearshare.

The answer is simple: You can't. I have tried it for months now, and it has never worked. Nobody in this forum knows how to do it either, as that topic is usually posted about three to four times a week and noone has ever got a helpful response from any user or moderator. If you need to resume your partial downloads you should think about migrating to Phex which is also cross-platform - but it doesn't look as nice as LimeWire ;-) . Whatever Lime Group claims about resuming 'across hosts', i am sure that noone has ever been able to resume anything with Lime. And I am also sure that none of the moderators will dare posting a reply.

Don't get me wrong; except for the nonexistant resuming feature I am a great fan of Lime and I do advise all my friends to use it. But I don't like the way Lime Group claims that LimeWire has features it just doesn't have, and I especially mislike the way of remaining silent in the shadows whenever this question is posted.

I have also written an email to the LimeWire support but i only got excuses about too many requests that couldn't be answered.

I'm really not sure how this rumor got started; LimeWire has always supported resumed downloads! Here's how it works:

If you are downloading a file, and the server disconnects you, LimeWire will automatically try to resume the file. If the resumes don't work after several attempts, it enters the "Couldn't Download" state. If you hit the "Force Resume", LimeWire will try the resume process all over. If you kill LimeWire while the download is in progress, LimeWire will try to resume the download next time it runs.

Now, if you have several hosts in a download group, LimeWire will even try to resume the file from another host in the group. If that file couldn't be downloaded, LimeWire will try other files (e.g., with different sizes or names) in the group. However, the original download attempt stays in the Incomplete directory for your convenience.

Here's what LimeWire can't do. First, LimeWire does not provide a way to re-search for a file and add that file to an existing download group. It may do so in the future. Secondly, it doesn't support resumptive push uploads. That's not really a problem, since the push route will have expired by the time you get to resume, but we'll implement it in an upcoming version.

Regards,
Christopher Rohrs
Senior Software Engineer
LimeWire

I follow most of your explanation, and I have not tried the Force Resume when it says, Couldn't Download. However, I have tried and tried to get a file that has, in a previous session, downloaded say 90% of the file size. On a subsequent use of the program, after closing and reopening Limewire, and searching for and finding the exact named file with the exact same file size,and trying to download it again, after verifying that a 90% partial exists in the incomplete directory, Limewire starts at the beginning again. Bearshare will ALWAYS start at the end of the partial. I cannot justify my time using Limewire any further until this problem is fixed.

Kencam

Right, that's what I mentioned in the last paragraph above; although LimeWire will resume in every way possible from the hosts of a smart download group, you can't add new search results to a group. We will try to add this feature in a future release.

In the meanwhile there is a dirty hack you can use to resume from different searches. If you look at your Incomplete files, you will see that they are of the form "N(slot)-(size)-(name)" for normal downloads, where (slot) is a number that starts at 0 and is always increasing, (size) is the file's size, and (name) is the file's name. (Push downloads have a different form; let's not worry about that.) This scheme allows you to download two copies of the same file at the same time without interleaving them on disk, e.g., in case you want to try two hosts in parallel. By renaming these files appropriately, you can force new downloads to resume from old search results. You can even force LimeWire to resume from a file with a different name. Again, this will probably be automated in the future.

Thanks for the feedback.

Christopher Rohrs
Sr. Software Engineer
LimeWire

I have already tried it that way with LimeWire 1.3 and 1.4, and the only effect was that the existing part was deleted and the download began at 0% again.

Furthermore, I know well how you expect the Resume Feature to work, but I can tell you that it has never worked on my machine.
Normally, a transfer gets interrupted because the user on the other end killed the upload or disconnected from the net. a resume try will therefor have no effect at all. I have never observed that LimeWire actually was able to connect to another servent of that group and resume the file, even if there were 15 entries in the group.

And was I wrote was true: This question is posted over and over and I am not the first one who complained about not getting answers to it. (just look for old threads and you will see)

I have asked many limers an how it is done, and everyone told me that they never got a download resumed properly, just as i didn't., that's why i don't think that it is a fault of my system.

Thanks for the tips. I will try the rename with a new search to see if I can make that work.

I appreciate your answers, apparently others are much more frustrated. You sound like you are involved in the development of Limewire. I think you have some great features, and with a solid resume feature, you would knock Bearshare off the shelf. I have noticed, though, that the speeds I get with Bearshare are much higher than with Limewire. I have Roadrunner, so I have a much larger range of possibilities than many others. On Bearshare, I see frequently downloads of 220 to 280 kbps by others from my computer, and I can download from others frequently at over 300 kbps. Huge files, over 100 megs take less than one hour.

On Limewire, however, I have never seen a transfer on my machine going either direction ever exceed about 60 or 70 kbps.

Thanks again.

Kencam

By the way, would you be so kind as to describe what "renaming appropriately" means?

Thanks,

Kent

Sure. Say you originally tried to download a file named "a.txt" that was 1000 bytes long. Then you will see a temporary file named Nx-1000-a.txt in your Incomplete directory, where x is some seemingly random slot number. (Again, we're assuming normal downloads only. Push downloads are a slightly different beast.)

Now, say you want to resume where the download left off from a file named b.txt that is 999 bytes long. You should rename the incomplete file to Ny-999-b.txt, where y is LimeWire's next "slot number". Figuring out y isn't so easy. If you have just started LimeWire and have no downloads, y should be 0. It is incremented after every subsequent download. In any case, when you try to download "b.txt" from your search result window, LimeWire will be fooled into trying the resume from the incomplete file for a.

Yup, it's a pain and we're planning on improving this. Keep in mind, however, that you probably won't have to do this if you really take advantage of LimeWire's smart grouping feature; go for groups with four stars and lots of entries, and LimeWire's "resume across hosts" feature will do the work for you.

-Christopher Rohrs
Sr. Software Engineer
LimeWire

Well, the Resume feature works for me. If I select the file for which the "Download Failed" and click the resume button, it picks up the download from where it left off. Caveats: I've done this within minutes after I lost my dial-up connection, so the same file is most likely available from the same source. I haven't tried it hours or days later.