{"id":666,"date":"2025-09-10T14:20:36","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T14:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/?p=666"},"modified":"2025-09-10T14:20:36","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T14:20:36","slug":"download-responsibly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/2025\/09\/10\/download-responsibly\/","title":{"rendered":"Download responsibly!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This month we&#8217;ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier<br \/>\nand faster. There&#8217;s also a small technical change in that requests for a &#8220;&#8230;latest&#8221; file will now be answered with a<br \/>\nHTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post).<\/p>\n<p>I would like to use this opportunity to appeal to users of the download server to &#8220;download responsibly&#8221;. We want<br \/>\nto continue offering this service as powerful and as convenient as possible within our means. We want everyone<br \/>\nto have easy access to the latest OSM data in a form that is useful to them.<\/p>\n<p>Every now and then, people break things for others. There have been individual clients downloading the exact same<br \/>\n20-GB file 100s of times per day, for several days in a row. (Just the other day, one user has managed to download almost 10,000 copies of the italy-latest.osm.pbf file in 24 hours!) Others download every single file we have on the<br \/>\nserver, every day. There&#8217;s a limit to the outgoing network bandwidth, and behaviour like this means that<br \/>\nthings are slowing down for everyone. Also, when we block an IP range for abuse, innocent third parties can be affected. <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s three concrete appeals to users of the download server:<\/p>\n<p>1. If you want data for the whole planet, don&#8217;t download it piecemeal from us &#8211; simply get the planet file from planet.openstreetmap.org and you&#8217;re done!<br \/>\n2. If you want a large region (like Europe or North America) updated daily, use the excellent pyosmium-up-to-date program which will automatically determine the age of your local file and update it by downloading the latest changes; this saves something like 98% of network traffic compared to a fresh download, and is faster.<br \/>\n3. If you automate anything with regard to our download server, monitor what your script is doing or build in appropriate catches so that you don&#8217;t end up downloading the same file 1000 times just because your disk is full or something like that.<\/p>\n<p>Happy downloading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This month we&#8217;ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier and faster. There&#8217;s also a small technical change in that requests for a &#8220;&#8230;latest&#8221; file will now be answered with a HTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post). I would like to use [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":667,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions\/667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}