A few days ago TorrentFreak reported that an anonymous user of The Pirate Bay had managed to copy the entire site and upload it as a torrent. Now the inevitable has happened - a working copy of the world's most infamous torrent site is already up and running, created from the files downloaded from the backup torrent.

Four days ago TorrentFreak broke the news that a copy of The Pirate Bay’s entire site was being shared, somewhat appropriately, on The Pirate Bay.

The 21.3 Gigabyte torrent was created by anonymous reader who told us: “I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again.”

His work was well appreciated. Dozens of other publications picked up on the story and now there are many hundreds of seeds and leechers on the torrent.

It’s anyone’s guess how many people now have the site’s code and all 873,671 torrent files but Alex from BTArena has contacted TorrentFreak with some very interesting news.

“I made an online copy of The Pirate Bay,” he told us. “Everything works from browse to download, except search,” he said, adding that he’s working on the search functionality now. User comments are not included in the backup.

Update: Search is now operational

Update2: Search is now disabled due to high server load. It will be recoded and return soon.

“Right after TPB decided to sell and become ‘legal’ I was thinking about moving their torrents to http://tracker.btarena.org but they have many low quality torrents on the index. Now thanks to some user, other users can still use a TPB backup,” he told TorrentFreak. “And this is what I want to it to remain as, just a backup,” he added.

TPB Copy

The copy of The Pirate Bay is available at BTArena.net and will remain as a TPB archive, while we’re told that tracker.btarena.org can be used to track new torrents, if people wish.

The torrents available from the BTArena.net copy still carry the announce URLs from The Pirate Bay’s tracker but since all torrents were updated with the OpenBitTorrent tracker, they will remain functional even when GGF’s version of the site takes over at the end of this month, should they decide to turn it off or mess around with it.

If there are any experienced moderators, or indeed, soon to be ex-moderators of The Pirate Bay, feel free to make contact through the BTArena forum.