FileFortress has always been great at telling you what you have: scan your clouds, build a local index, and search across all of them in one place. But sooner or later you don't want to know about a file - you want the file. On your disk. Now.
Until today that meant leaving FileFortress, opening the provider's web UI, hunting down the same file you already found, and clicking its download button. The new files download command closes that gap: once you've found a file, you can pull it straight down to your machine without switching tools.
filefortress files download <remote> <file> downloads a single file from any remote - Google Drive, OneDrive, AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or Local - to local storage. It keeps the file's folder structure from the remote, works from the CLI or the desktop app, and saves into a tidy downloads folder right next to your FileFortress data.
Point it at a remote and a file path - the same path you see in ls or search - and it does the rest. The same command works no matter which provider the file lives on, so there's nothing new to learn per cloud.
# Pull a file down from an S3 remote
filefortress files download myS3 photos/2024/trip.jpg
# Choose where it lands, and replace an existing copy
filefortress files download gdrive "Reports/Q3.pdf" --destination ~/Downloads --overwrite
# No arguments? Pick the remote and file interactively
filefortress files downloadRun it with no arguments and FileFortress walks you through it: pick a remote from the list, type (or paste) the file path, and go. It's the same friendly, interactive style as the rest of the CLI - helpful when you're exploring, out of the way when you're scripting with --non-interactive.
You download files FileFortress already knows about, so run remotes scan on a remote first. If a file isn't in your local index yet, the command tells you to scan and try again.
A download is only useful if you can find it afterwards. So instead of dumping every file into one flat folder, FileFortress mirrors the layout the file had on the remote, grouped by which remote it came from:
downloads/<remote-name>/<same path as on the remote>
# e.g. photos/2024/trip.jpg from a remote named "myS3"
downloads/myS3/photos/2024/trip.jpgBy default that downloads folder sits right next to your FileFortress database, so everything you pull down is in one predictable place that's easy to browse. Prefer somewhere else? Pass --destination and downloads go there instead, structure preserved.
The download runs through the same provider integrations the rest of FileFortress uses, so Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, Backblaze B2, and Local all behave the same way - one command, consistent results, no per-cloud quirks to memorize.
Not everything needs the command line. The same capability is wired into the places you're already looking at files:
Open a file in the File Explorer and click Download in its detail pane. The app tells you exactly where the file landed.
Browsing with filefortress ls? Open a file's details and choose Download this file - no need to retype the path.
Because the desktop app runs locally on your own machine, "download" means the file is saved straight to your disk in that same downloads folder - no extra round trip, no browser prompt. Whichever surface you prefer, it's the same engine underneath.
Here's the good part: if you encrypted your remote with RClone Crypt, files download now pulls the file down and decrypts it locally - the bytes that land on your disk are the real, readable file, and the password you configured never leaves your machine. The one scheme still in progress is FileFortress's own AES-256-CBC content; those remotes stay fully browsable and searchable, and downloading their decrypted contents is coming next.
Indexing your clouds told you what you had. Now FileFortress hands it back when you need it - one command, any provider, right where you'll look for it.
Search across every cloud, then pull any file down to your disk with one command - Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, Backblaze, and Local.