For anyone who likes to have archive dot org collections on their local drives, might I suggest Free Download Manager.
It took a little figuring out but it was worth it. Just install the app and add the browser plugin through the preferences.
With the browser plugin installed click-and-drag to highlight the files you want, right click and select “Download selected with FDM”. It will parse the highlighted text and generate a list of files.
It will then switch to the app. Set your download location and then start the downloads (you can modify the list after it’s started). Once it’s started you can right click the line item set in the “All” or “Active” tab and click “Show downloads”.
This will list out all the files the queue. You can sort them by clicking the column headers and remove files you don’t want by right clicking (for instance I had a ton of index.html files). You can also do a shift click multi-select if you want to change multiple files in the queue. I’m thinking you can also use the file-list.xml to get the links too, but I haven’t tried yet. Might help to avoid superfluous files.
The main feature though is how fast it works.
FDM will automatically change the connected server to the fastest one and get four files at a time, getting consistent speeds of around 3-6mb per second like this:
Sometimes the speed goes much higher. Downloads would normally drop off to like >100kb per second on consecutive downloads just doing it through the browser.
There are ways to make your own plugins and scripts but what I’ve shown above is built in. If your annoyed by slow speeds and manually getting files then this is an essential tool. What would have taken a couple to weeks get only took one day and I didn’t need to do anything once it got started.
