How To Download A New Copy Of The Pirate Bay's Archives, Just In Case, And With TPB's Blessing

Users of The Pirate Bay can now download a copy of all of TPB's most important data and magnet links, just in case something happens to the file-sharing giant. And The Pirate Bay is totally cool with it.

The Pirate Bay continues to thrive as the most controversial, most divisive and most visible torrent site on the Web, but folks who depend on it for all their downloading needs may have entirely warranted doubts about just how long it will be around.

Though there is no new information out there to suggest that the site will be taken down or blocked in the near future, that doesn't mean it isn't worth having a backup copy should the situation change. Just look at what happened to Kim Dotcom's Megaupload service.

And now, thanks to a new 75 megabyte backup -- small enough to put on a thumbdrive -- that was added to the torrent site on Monday, you can simply download a copy of the entire Pirate Bay archive of 2 million magnet links, key data and more, all via the official TPB website itself. It's like backing up your PC, except instead of having a second copy of all your college photos and bad poetry, you retain access to the millions of files available to download via links provided by The Pirate Bay.

Simply click this link to be taken to the download page for the TPB archive file, which the poster describes as "another pirate bay archive, this time even smaller and with reasonable XML format. Just pirate bay ID, magnet link and the name of the torrent."

Or, if you want an even more comprehensive file, replete with descriptions, comments and file sizes, click this link to download a still-small 631 megabyte version, described by the poster as "Complete Pirate Bay archive (from february 2013). Includes all the possible information - names, descriptions, comments, seeder and leecher info, date of upload, size info and quality marks (only for some torrents, before before TPB took it down). It does NOT contain the torrent files, but it does contain magnet links."

The file is the latest in a series of similar archives, only with the approximately 500,000 new magnet links that have been added since the creation of the 2012 version.

Magnet links work by connecting downloaders ("leechers") with computers that have the file ("seeders"), from which the leechers can download the file using torrent clients like uTorrent or Vuze.

According to TorrentFreak, The Torrent Bay has given its blessing for the files to be available via the site, so feel free to download them without fear of reprisal -- or disappointed looks -- from TPB.

Karel Bílek, who created the archive files, tells TorrentFreak that one purpose of creating the archive is to ensure the trove of torrents held at The Pirate Bay is never lost:

“Pirate Bay is a great resource of books, movies, music… and it would be a shame if it was brought down,” Bílek told the site. "The torrents themselves are kind of resilient, but still, you need the basic information about the torrents. So this is an archive of sorts, if the Pirate Bay is brought down, the information from the site can still be used and the site somehow reconstructed.”