Recently, someone was trying to send me a 20Gb virtual machine image over dropbox. I tried a couple of times to download using chrome, however it got to 6-8Gb and then came up with a connection error. Clicking on the resume button failed and then removed the file (!). Very strange as I didn’t have any connection issues, but perhaps a route changed somewhere. I saw a number of dropbox users complaining about this on the internet. Obviously there are other approaches such as adding to your own dropbox account and using their local program to do the sync, however because I’m just on a standard free account I couldn’t add in such a large file.

Because I was using btrfs and snapper I still had a version of the half-completed download around, and so I tried seeing if standard linux tools would be able to continue the download where it left off. It turns out that simply using wget -c enables you to resume the download (it dropped a couple of times during the download but just restarting it with the same command let the whole file download just fine. So, to download a large dropbox file even if your internet connection is a bit flakey, simply go to the dropbox download link and then paste it into the terminal (may require the ?dl=1 parameter after it) like:

wget -c .https://dl.dropbox.com/...?dl=1