Post by cjm on Jun 18, 2016 18:19:42 GMT
This is an account of my adventures a few months ago. Perhaps it is of help to someone.
I wanted to download a VW workshop manual of 9 GB
Nothing to it, I thought. How wrong I was.
I paid some R250 for the right to download a copy (a RAR-file).
The first thing I noticed was that there was a time limit of three days. No problem, plenty of time, even though I am on a slow connection going through how many routers and relay towers.
The downloader indicated that it would take me a about two days.
The next shock. Whenever an internet service disruption occured (which I generally have plenty of), the download would start again at the beginning. There is a pay option available on some downloaders which claims to continue the download regardless of resumption being supported by the server on the supply side. In my case that server did not offer resumption capabilities. At that stage I still thought that I could get away with a “free download” and did not consider the pay option.
Also consider that at this stage time was running out. So I started looking at sites offering cloud services and direct downloads from any given link. After going through how many registrations for such services I discovered that the “free cloud sites” limit the sizes of the downloads. They would offer, for example, in the best scenario case, cloud space of up to 15 G but limit either the time over which the space can be utilised or the size of a download. In the best case the download size was limited to some 2 G.
I use DropBox and decided that if I have to pay, I might as well pay them. I increased my space on a monthly basis to 1 TB (=apparently 1000 GB) for about R150 – the idea being that once the file was on my PC, I would drop the subscription.
The next shock. Uploads to DropBox can only be made via one’s own PC. This helped a fat lot.
*Fortunately* there are services such as BoxMyDownloads – at a price of some $5 for the year. They tout 5 free downloads per day but limit the download to 100 000 MB/download. So, goodbye another $5
One can download via their site to DropBox, directly from a link (ie, it is not necessary to download to your own PC first)
It took about an hour-and-a-half to download the file to DropBox.
Once the file is in DropBox, you can move or copy it at high speeds to other parts of your PC
There are many free programs extracting RAR-files so fortunately that was not a problem.
My trials and tribulations are not over yet as the file in question requires a 64 bit OS to open. In addition the files are virtual machine ones. I think it should be possible to open them with a virtual machine running on a 32 bit OS but that I have not managed yet.
Anyone interested in a file copy of the VW (Golf) workshop manual concerned?
