Settings.dat File

[Marine Farinha]

Im automating the deployment of a Windows Store App and I'd like to automatically set one of the settings that a user would normally configure in the settings charm. I've learned that the settings are stored in a settings.dat file, which can be opened in the registry. But this is a binary file and I have no idea how I would edit the setting I want through Powershell. Is this even something I can do or is the effort not worth it? Thanks.

AFAIK there's no way to edit registry files when they are not loaded into the registry. I played with it for a while and found a way to do it, but you need to temporarily load the registry file into your registry and edit it there. It seems you need to use reg.exe to do this.

The other problem are custom property types which are used in this registry file (5f5e10c instead of e.g. REG_BINARY). Both PowerShell and .NET APIs don't seem to be able to load them or correctly save them. I had to export the keys, edit them in .reg file and import them back.

EDIT: I wrote an accompanying blog post describing the thought process behind the answer. It provides an even more in depth explanation and links to a PowerShell function implementation wrapping the above script.

The instructions don't appear to be correct. I found a hidden .sync folder, but it didn't contain the settings files. I found the settings files in the user/app data/roaming/bittorrent sync folder and deleted them, but running the client still asks for username and password.

You can try clearing cookies and cache for localhost and 127.0.0.1 addresses in your browser and try opening WebUI page again. Also have you closed Sync before deleting settings.dat and settings.dat.old files?

I have been following along to this as well as a new user. Can anyone please tell me what the password is for? Everything is working with Sync on Ubuntu for me, never have to enter password. If I go to the Login screen (in Preferences) the username field is pre-filled with "admin" and I do not know the current password - is there a default login / password? As P.D. said, there are no settings.dat and settings.dat.old files in the .sync folders.

It's for logging on to the web interface. When there are multiple users on a machine or when you bind the web UI to some 'external' interface (so, not the loopback interface), you'll definitely want it for security.

Thank you. I definitely want it but apparently can't have it! Do you know if there is a default password for the program that goes with the default admin user name? Posted wrong screenshot in my previous post. Please also see contents of .sync folder with hidden files shown - there are no there are no settings.dat and settings.dat.old files.

settings.dat file is located in the storage folder. It is not Sync folder located inside your shared folder. That folder is located near btsync binary file or somewhere else if you use config file. This command will help you locating storage folder location:

Found the files in /var/lib/btsyc, deleted them and went back to staring at the same screen on the login tab of preference thinking "what am I missing?" Turns out that one has to enter one's new chosen User name and passwords, IGNORING the Current password field. Was getting tripped up trying to enter a current password that I thought I had set somewhere in the install process of Sync. Thank you.

It appears I was on the right track to rename the .old settings and resume.dat's but utorrent does not seem to pick them up in that, after re-launching utorrent the queue is blank and looking at Preferences these are the defaults, not mine.

I noticed a couple of new .dmp files so decided to try restoring again and look at the logger, this is what I found which I think explains things, the settings.dat and resume.dat from the recovery appear to be damaged. I do have a couple more resume.dat_x.old files so will try them but my settings look like toast. I can re-enter the location changes and the other stuff I changed was mostly from forum posts for more efficient running so can probably replicate (not my main problem though). I do have a backup from 5 years ago which actually won't be far off.

Have now amended the Preferences to show my folder structure. Saved and checked they are still active on restart. I then created a resume.dat, resume.dat.old and a resume.dat.new from what I think is a valid resume.dat (old) backup (in that it doesn't give errors in the log).

I havent totally given up and really hope someone can provide that missing bit of info that may allow me to get my queue back. It was massive as I'm a diligent seeder for a number of sites and keep 100s of torrent live but stopped in case of requests. Many of those are 'partials' where I didn't need all the files in the torrent. I also had loads that had stalled part way through but often complete over time. It would be a massive task to try and get anywhere near recreating this BUT

I think 1) may be possible using an AUTOLOAD folder. The one with my .torrent files in it is over 8,000 files, there's no way I had 8,000 torrents in the queue and can see 100's that are old/archived data and deleted, I do normally "delete .torrent and data" so not sure why they are there but I have found when I download a torrent it is stored in 2 places.

Recovery means everything after that image is gone and must be manually recreated. There is nothing that can be done at this point. If you had saved the utorrent app folder data you might've had a chance to restore it but since that wasn't saved then nothing can be done here. All utorrent activities or files after that image will be gone. Without the app/data folder all those torrent must be re-created or found where you got them to restart them from "0" bytes is what's going to happen is what I recall. The problem here is if the folder you saved didn't replace the other one created with the image it will not work correctly.

What you recovered was the last app/data folder at the time the recovery image was made not the current app/data folder you had before you did the recovery. Anything after that would be missing or corrupted as you mentioned because the app/data folder data has gone bad as a result of that. If you had backup the app/data folder and deleted the recovered image of the previous app/data folder with the backup one that would've restored your torrent settings but as that wasn't not done there is nothing that can be done to help here. Once that is gone it's gone and you will have to start over those torrent using the torrent .ut files to redo or restart the torrent from "0" bytes or if it find the exact torrent to resume where it last stopped. So beyond these two measures if both can't be done then there is nothing more this forum can help with since that wasn't a utorrent caused issue.

Thanks, I was hoping the .old files, as they were only a few minutes 'older' than the 'live' one I deleted would work. I doubt there would have been any changes to the queue in that time, possibly adding a torrent or two, maybe deleting one.

I've made the decision to start from scratch, which was no easy decision as there were 4,300+ torrents in the queue as I keep many private torrent files 'live' although not all seeding of course so I can respond to reseed requests. That's not a huge issue apart from the time it will take to re-add the torrent (as stopped), set all contents to download, do a forced recheck, set all those at 0% to [Don't download] and restart (many torrents I have only partially downloaded, i.e. certain episodes).

Realistically there is no way I am going to get those 4,300 back, looking just at private tracker downloads I want to keep seeding we are talking may 600-800 which I'll do over the coming weeks. There's maybe a couple of hundred more that I'd also want to re-instate.

In trying to 'carry on' whilst leaving utorrent install untouched I moved to my win7 laptop, sadly 2.2.1 would not allow me to connect to my most used site (tvchoas) so ended up trying a few alternatives, qBitorrent, Vuze, BiglyBt but none give me the flexibility of utorrent so I'm going to continue with 2.2.1 whilst maybe looking into the latest utorrent. I did have many reasons for staying with 2.2.1 in the past but not sure of the current situation).

BUT, should I get some corruption of the settings or resume.dat files, how useful are the .old files? is it possible to use them to get back to an 'earlier' state EVEN IF one or two of the torrents that were in that queue are not there anymore?

Just to 're-ask' a question from before, does the RESUME.DAT file contain ALL the torrent queue information, ALL the entries, all the status's, all the individual files states (high, normal, skip etc.) ?

If any parts of the app/data folder is corrupted it probably won't work to restore in it's entirety as a whole all those files more or less has to be checked for integrity to work together and mixing and matching will not fix it. I've done it with 2.2.1 and before recovery image I backup the app/data folder and then deleted the recovered image app/data folder and copy back the backup app/data folder and then restarted utorrent and all my files and actions where back. But this also means there must not be any hardware or utorrent settings changed saved location from that point on otherwise you will have to go and redo each file themselves.

Windows Store apps offer two containers for storing application settings as key-value pairs: ApplicationData.LocalSettings and ApplicationData.RoamingSettings. API for both is the same; the only difference between them is, how the settings are persisted: locally only or are they roamed across all user's devices.

If you've done any Windows Store development, you might already now that all application data from Windows Store apps is saved to Local\Packages inside user's AppData folder (usually C:\Users\Username\AppData). Each application has its own subfolder there; its name is concatenated from the application package name and a signing certificate based postfix. Of course, you can find the settings there as well: there's a settings.dat file inside the Settings subfolder.

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