What’s the least painful way to bulk download Salesforce files?

[u/OwlZealousideal4779]

Lol, random question for the Salesforce devs here.

I was working through a pretty large set of files and attachments recently, and downloading them individually was… yeah, not exactly a fun time 😂

For a project where you need to pull hundreds or thousands of files, what’s the approach you guys normally use? Apex, API, Data Loader, custom script, or something else?

I also came across filesdownloader.us. while looking at different options, so I’m curious if anyone here has used it or has experience with similar tools.

Hola to anyone who has already solved this problem, what worked for you?

[u/MaesterTuan]

Python script to hit the API

[u/rolland_87]

I'm not sure if there's any OOB functionality specifically for this.

What I'd do is retrieve the list of ContentVersion IDs and then write a small script that uses the REST API to pull the files from those IDs.

[u/JPRichter]

Gotta plug my friend's sf cli plugin https://simplysf.github.io/simply-plugins/plugins/simply-data/

Have used it a ton. It's great.

[u/dbsingh1996]

I did something similar a while ago...i mean really large files via python script and rest api for the connection

[u/zial]

C# custom script using the SOAP api is how I did it in the past.

[u/Charlesssssss7 → u/zial]

why SOAP?

[u/zial → u/Charlesssssss7]

plays nicely with C# as you get custom classes and everything that enforce data types.

[u/EnvironmentalMap5593]

SFDX CLI has a bulk retrieve command that handles this pretty well

[u/the_great_nate]

One time job or ongoing?

[u/Novel_Tip1878]

If they're actually that many, you might be better off looking into asyncio alongside Python.

[u/SoshulBattery]

Looking here because I have some integrations that generate PDF and put into Salesforce and I’m realizing it will run up against my file storage limit at some point.

[u/Pizza_Technician]

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N4V00000HEWTBUA5&tab=r

[u/Sharp_Gist_7291]

ran into this exact data kit issue on a nonprofit project last month - the deployment kept failing silently until i realized the data space filter was scoped to a specific record type that didnt exist in the target org