This might be the best way to go about it. Wireguard has an iOS client and it should be easy to set up. I’ve done this for dumber devices, should be okay.

Or frankly, some others here are mentioning that logging in to one service doesn’t automatically log you into all of them. So maybe I’d be giving my family member more flexibility by not limiting them to a small number of servers as defined in the configs, since each one needs a file and picking among them is annoying if there’s an issue.

That said, going from 5 euro a month for Mullvad to 5 + 10 to add Proton does add up, and to be honest, a second free Proton address and a second Mullvad subscription (and investing in a more local solution instead of getting tied down to Proton Drive) might be better for me.

But I haven’t made any decisions just yet. The 500GB of storage might just end up swaying me.

So, there are other peers, some of which gave me all of the data that I have so far, a small number of them. They can connect just fine to me, so their ports are open.

There are other peers with only a small percentage of the total torrent that are permanently connected, which might mean that they only wanted to download some of the files, but looking at the file list availability when they were the only connected peers, they had scattered chunks of data and not one continuous folder.

Now the convoluted part that I feel needs its own post:

In my quest to get the data, I’ve done some digging on BTdig, and added a few torrents with what seemed to be almost identical content. Most of these were completely inactive, but it seems like my client figured out that there’s overlap with this torrent, somehow. It now shows one of these inactive torrents as having a small % completion, despite also showing that 0 bytes were downloaded. I suspect it was able to match some of the data.

I wish I better understood that part of torrenting, a lot of what I want is relatively obscure and I love nothing more than seeding files that took months to complete. Being able to stitch together torrents and make rarities a bit less rare is exactly what I want to do.