How to Move Your qBittorrent Installation to a Different Windows PC

You may have upgraded your computer, reinstalled Windows, or moved your hard drives. Is there a way to continue using qBittorrent as before without losing any of the torrents you added? Can you continue your downloads from where you left off without adding everything back to the qBittorrent list from scratch?

The answer is probably a positive "yes," but the way to do it isn't as simple as copying a folder from point A to point B. However, as we'll see below, it's not overly complicated.

Establishing an action plan to move qBittorrent

In this article, we will see how it is possible to migrate the qBittorrent installation, keeping all the settings that we had previously customized and the progress of all the torrent files. This will allow us to resume downloads and uploads from where we were before.

That's why the process we'll be looking at here is a bit more involved than just reinstalling an app and moving some files.

The first step will be to copy the qBittorrent configuration files from the old environment to the new one. Then do the same for all torrent files.
Next, we will need to adjust and modify the qBittorrent settings in the new environment to account for the discrepancies compared to the old one.
Finally, we'll need to re-verify all torrent files to make sure the new qBittorrent installation "knows everything it needs" about their current state.

Note that for the sake of simplicity, in the rest of this article, we will talk about how to move qBittorrent installation from an old PC to a new one. However, the steps we will see should be the same whether you moved the drives or reinstalled your operating system.

Still, with a new PC, you might also like to keep your software up to date and try new things, like another torrent client. Although qBittorrent ranks first in our best torrent clients for windows article, you will also find some good alternative options there.

How to move your torrents

Since we are dealing with migrating the qBittorrent installation from an old PC to a new one, you will need a way to facilitate this data exchange.

You can use a flash drive to transfer the app's setup files and a handful of small torrents from your old PC to your new one. It is best to use a sizable external hard drive or network connection between PCs for large amounts of data.

Still, we'll skip those details as the data transfer method won't affect anything we see here. Therefore, we will assume an unspecified method of copying data between your PCs. Feel free to choose the solution you prefer.

Launch a file manager on the source PC from which you want to move your qBittorrent installation to the new PC. Visit your user account folder and within it, navigate to AppData > Local > qBittorrent. The route in our case was: c:\Users\koura\AppData\Local\qBittorrent. Copy the contents of this folder to the equivalent path on your new PC. Remember to update the username part of the path if it is different on your second computer.
Go back to your user account folder on the original PC, and this time navigate to the AppData > Roaming > qBittorrent path. Do the same as above and copy all your content to the equivalent path on your new PC.
For the final data transfer, you need to move the folder where your torrents were stored from your old PC to the new one. We cannot offer details for that because its configuration depends on your qBittorrent configuration. In our case, we had two separate folders, one for incoming torrents and another for those who had finished downloading Both conveniently located inside a "torrents" folder on an external hard drive. Unplugging it from the old PC and plugging it back into the new one was all it took to "transfer our torrents."

The problem of moving qBittorrent to a different drive letter

Moving your torrent collection to your new PC should be a piece of cake if you keep it on an external hard drive like we did. Still, you may encounter a small problem: the drive may be assigned a different letter on your new PC, which prevents the qBittorrent installation from finding your torrents. qBittorrent will look for them in Drive Dwhile your torrent drive was assigned the letter H.

The simple fix for that problem is to change your torrent drive letter to the same one that was assigned to it on your old PC. For more information on this, see our guide on how to change drive letters in windows.

With all your torrent files in the same place as before, if you run qBittorrent on your new PC, it should detect them and start uploading.

And yet, swapping drive letters may be impossible or lead to other problems. For example, you may have started using your new PC and already actively used another drive with the same letter as your torrent drive on your old PC. In this case, changing your torrent drive letter to "fix" qBittorrent could damage other software.

Fortunately, there is a solution for that as well, as we will see below. However, it is more complicated than reassigning a letter.

Update and double check your folder paths

If you can't or don't want to change your torrent drive letter, or you did, but qBittorrent still doesn't detect your torrents, you need to make sure you're looking in the right place. For that, with qBittorrent running...

Click on the application Options button (with the little gear icon).
Select the downloads list page on the left and scroll down a bit to find Default save path. Make sure it points to the correct path for your downloaded torrent folder. Here, if, like us, you also used a second folder for sketchy torrents, make sure the option Use another path for incomplete torrents is enabled and that the field to its right also points to the correct folder for your media downloaded files. Click OK to save the changes to the qBittorrent configuration and exit the Options window.
Completely exit qBittorrent and run it again. This time it should find and start importing your torrents. However, it may not correctly detect your progress and general condition. To fix this, highlight all your torrent files in the qBittorrent transfer list, right-click on them and select force review. If your transfer list adds up to several gigabytes, and especially if it's stored on an old and slow hard drive, this process can take a while. When finished, the migrated qBittorrent installation should be indistinguishable from the original.

And once again, that might not be enough. qBittorrent also supports categories, each of which may have its own path. So if you used that feature to download your torrents in different folders, you also need to update the path of each category.

Unfortunately, each category could point a different path. There is no way to fix them all in one move. You will have to right click on each category and select Edit category. So, low save routeclick the folder icon button and direct the applicant to the correct path on their PC.

When you're finally done and your torrent settings are up to date, it's time to move on to the next logical step, which also involves "torrenting" and "speed" - check out our article with Top tips to increase torrent download speed.

When you finally start downloading again, don't look for torrent links on crappy sites: qBittorrent comes with a built-in search function that you can use to find new torrents. Plus, we've covered how you can make it even more useful by expand it with more search engines.

A seamless transition for qBittorrent

It may involve taking an external hard drive from your old PC and plugging it into the new one, but migrating your qBittorrent installation between computers isn't that simple.

Fortunately, as we saw, you don't have to say goodbye to your torrents, or manually (and painstakingly) add them back to your new qBittorrent installation one by one.

Moving a bunch of existing files to the right new place and changing a handful of options in qBittorrent is all it takes to seamlessly migrate all your torrents from your old PC to your new PC.