Fast and Easy ways to Download Large Google Drive Files or Folders

Hey everyone,

Today I am going to discuss about most easy and fastest ways to download Google drive large sized files or folders.

Google Drive is great storage which can be accessed anywhere on any devices to get access to files or backups stored on Drive but it gives limited storage for personal use. It’s provide upto 15GB storage for free personal accounts. When it gets completely full then you won’t be able to store anything else or maintain your backups.

Then the options you are left with either buy more storage which is really expensive to be honest or free some space by removing files from Drive that are not needed anymore.

Credits to Source — https://www.cbackup.com/articles/google-drive-storage-not-updating.html

Now before doing a cleanup activity you will need to backup data that you are going to delete from Drive just in case if you need that data in future. So first you will download it and then delete it permanently from Drive.

Now this downloading task is really frustrating when your Drive file or folder size is large(exceeding 2GB). Below 2GB, there is not much of issue, you will go and download the whole folder from single click but above downloads above 2GB are generally broken into multiple pieces.

Let’s say you have images folder of 6GB then it will be downloaded in 3 zip files separately(each of 2GB). In case of browser starting 3 downloads of 2GB your download speed will be distributed on each files then and it will be really slower process. Then after all downloads are done, you need to extract all zips and then merge them into single folder. Sometimes it even occurred with me that data of subfolder get really messed up that it gets really hard to manage.

So how to avoid this?

There are better ways to download large files to avoid this splitting of files into different parts while downloading large files and also achieve better downloading speed that browser is offering.

Google Drive Application

1. You can download the Google Drive application on any device from this link. When you install this application and connect your account, it offers all drive files access on your system directly inside file manager.
2. From there you can just copy the files and folder like you do with other folders. It also allows to sync your local files/folder to drive so it is really great to maintain regular backups.
3. It is way faster and optimized way to download files on your system, as on Drive it takes a lot of time to load files and folder. After clicking download it will start zipping it then gives downloading starts. But with this just move/copy the required files and paste to desired location on your system.
4. By this method you can also do all general file operations like copy, move, rename, delete, compress, etc.

Downloading from Terminal

1. gdown (best)

• I always go with this mostly as sometimes Google Drive application gets crashed while downloading too large files(I faced this issue while downloading files and folders above 10GB).

GitHub - wkentaro/gdown: Download a large file from Google Drive (curl/wget fails because of the…

• Install this from here. Mac/Linux users can use pip3 as below.

pip3 install gdown
pip3 install --upgrade gdown

• Use it as discussed below according to your needs.

1. Files — get shareable link of required file and copy file_id then use first command

(Shareable link format — https://drive.google.com/file/d/<file_id>/view?usp=sharing)

2. Folders — Copy drive folder URL directly and use in second command.

(Note- If files count > 50 then use last command).

// Files
gdown <file_id>

// Folder
gdown <google_drive_folder_url> -O <location_for_download> --folder 

// Folder with count of files more than 50
gdown <google_drive_folder_url> -O <location_for_download> --folder --remaining-ok

• It also shows download stats directly into terminal.
• If you use curl/wget, it fails with a large file because of the security warning from Google Drive so Not recommended.
• You can look this for details.

Using the Google Drive API or Google Takeout

1. Google Drive API — Good to explore if — if you are developer otherwise avoid it 😄 — as it needs Google API key and that is out of scope here.
2. Google Takeout — Used majorly to export all Google account data into zip can be used. But takes time as download link will be sent via email later and that can be used for download.

• You should use Google Takeout if you are closing your account and want to export all data.

That’s all for now. Do try gdown — it is really great when downloading larger files like courses, movies, zip, etc.

Do share with others if you find this helpful.

For any suggestions or issues, you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

References:

1. gdown — https://github.com/wkentaro/gdown
2. google drive application — https://www.google.com/drive/download