Pirate Bay downloads to flash drive before sale

An anonymous uploader has provided the database of the world's biggest BitTorrent site for download just days before the iconic pirate website was sold to its new owners.

Fittingly, the 21.3 GB file was available as a torrent for download and fits on a high-capacity USB flash drive.

The Pirate Bay was sold in June to Global Gaming Factory X AB for $US7.8 million in cash and shares. The site made a name for itself taunting copyright holders who accused it of spreading illicit copies of films, music, books and software. It held no copyrighted material but allowed PC users to share parts of files with each other.

At the time, the Pirate Bay said on its blog that "if the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it".

"That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to," Pirate Bay's founders said.

But that wasn't guarantee enough, the anonymous Pirate Bay uploader told peer-to-peer blog, TorrentFreak.

"I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again," he said.

TorrentFreak said the backup included a mocked-up site and Pirate Bay's 873,671 torrent files.

"The basic website supplied in the torrent is a working site, where you can browse the index. You just need a lot of hardware to run a database of this size at a decent speed," the uploader told TorrentFreak.

"And thanks to openbittorrent.com, you don't even need a tracker."