Fetch Help > Using Fetch > Resuming an interrupted download

While Fetch tries to detect stalls and network or server errors and automatically resume downloads for you, if you accidentally stop the download of a large file before it completes (for example by quitting Fetch), it is often possible to save time by resuming the download of the file without re-downloading the part you already have:

1. Choose Remote > Resume Download to open the Resume Download window.
2. Select the name of the file you want to resume downloading, and then click the Resume button, or double-click its name.
3. Fetch will reopen the connection to the server the file is located on if necessary, and start the download from where it left off.

An interrupted transfer leaves a partial file in your download folder or the location you dragged the file to originally. You can also resume a download by double-clicking the partial file in the Finder.

Note that if you were downloading more than one file or a folder when the download stopped, the Resume Download feature can only finish downloading the file that was being transferred at the time — Fetch does not remember the list of files it was going to download, but hadn't gotten to yet. You will either have to go begin downloading any other untransferred files again manually, or see the advice below. (However, Fetch's automatic resume download feature does work to finish downloads of folders or multiple files.)

See the Resume Download window help topic for more information about using Resume Download.

## Resuming the download of multiple items

If you are trying to download many files and folders and your download was interrupted for some reason, you may want to consider using the Mirror command. The Mirror command lets you associate a folder on the server (the one with the files you're trying to download) with a folder on your Macintosh. Once you've done that, you can tell Fetch to mirror the contents of the remote folder to the local folder.

Fetch will compare the contents of the remote and local folders, and only download new or changed files. This means that files that have already been downloaded successfully won't be downloaded again. If your first attempt to mirror the folder stops before all the files are downloaded, you can tell Fetch to mirror again, and the next attempt will pick up where the last one left off, instead of starting from the beginning again. And after mirroring a few times, all your files will be downloaded.

Note that Fetch's automatic resume download feature should make this approach unnecessary under most circumstances.

See the Mirror window help topic for more information about mirroring.

Related topics:

- Resuming uploads