Recently I had a video editor send me a Dropbox folder link containing a large amount of ProRes video content (which are very large video files). Normally I opt to download the content from the Dropbox website… but I encountered an error due to the folder size: “The zip file is too large”.
Dropbox clearly wants to push users to clicking that enticing, blue “Copy to Dropbox” button prompting you to signup for an account. Yet another dark design pattern they’ve been called out for before.
Not wanting to waste time creating a Dropbox account, downloading the native app, signing in, upgrading to a paid plan, then copying files to my Dropbox… I discovered you can bypass this limitation with the wget command line utility and download the files directly to a local folder.
wget https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rAnDoMSharECHAraCTErSheRe/ --content-disposition(The --content-disposition flag uses Dropbox’s original file name rather than the tail of the url for the file name)