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Forum Discussion
API - downloading files bigger than 4GB
Are there any restrictions on the size of files downloaded via the HTTP API? I have a QNAP NAS that tries to sync with my Dropbox account. About 340GB of it works fine; the last 50 GB (spread ove...
There isn't a file size limit on downloads, but the HTTP requests themselves can time out if they take a long time. The "content-download endpoints", such as /2/files/download, do support Range Retrieval Requests though. That is a way of downloading portions of a file at a time, so it can be used to help avoid problems like this when downloading large files. This is something the developer of the app would need to implement.
However, from the information you shared I can't be sure if that's the actual issue. Since you mentioned all of the failures occur over 4GB, the issue may actually be with the local filesystem itself. For example, I believe FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB. That's outside the scope of Dropbox API support though, so I can't offer much insight on that.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox Staff
There isn't a file size limit on downloads, but the HTTP requests themselves can time out if they take a long time. The "content-download endpoints", such as /2/files/download, do support Range Retrieval Requests though. That is a way of downloading portions of a file at a time, so it can be used to help avoid problems like this when downloading large files. This is something the developer of the app would need to implement.
However, from the information you shared I can't be sure if that's the actual issue. Since you mentioned all of the failures occur over 4GB, the issue may actually be with the local filesystem itself. For example, I believe FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB. That's outside the scope of Dropbox API support though, so I can't offer much insight on that.
Thanks Greg, that's useful to know - and it gives me a convenient place to start looking in the documentation if it comes to having to convince the customer support rep they have to escalate. Since I posted I did a more thorough check of the data and it turns out there are no files between 1 and 4 gb (just a weird coincidence), so it could indeed still be a timeout issue.
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