Download

Some OpenPlanetData datasets are hundreds of gigabytes. A standard browser download uses a single HTTP connection, which rarely saturates modern network links. With a single connection, downloading a 175 GB file can take over an hour, even with a fiber connection.

Why Rclone?

Rclone solves this by splitting the file into many chunks and downloading them in parallel — making full use of your available bandwidth.

Rclone’s multi-threaded mode opens dozens of parallel connections, each fetching a different part of the file simultaneously. This lets you reach speeds that would otherwise be impossible with a single stream.

Here is a real-world example downloading the 175 GB OpenStreetMap GeoParquet dataset over a standard 8 Gbit/s residential ISP connection — this is a remote download, not local:

$ rclone copy \
    --buffer-size 0 \
    --disable-http2 \
    --http-url https://download.openplanetdata.com \
    :http:osm/planet/geoparquet/v1/planet-latest.osm.parquet . \
    --multi-thread-cutoff 0 \
    --multi-thread-streams 64 \
    --multi-thread-chunk-size 32M \
    --transfers 1 --progress

Transferred:        5.442 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 3%, 763.213 MiB/s, ETA 3m47s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Transferred:        6.338 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 4%, 783.920 MiB/s, ETA 3m39s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Transferred:       12.964 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 7%, 870.083 MiB/s, ETA 3m10s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Transferred:       14.347 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 8%, 876.515 MiB/s, ETA 3m7s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Transferred:       15.327 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 9%, 882.108 MiB/s, ETA 3m4s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Transferred:       78.810 GiB / 174.687 GiB, 45%, 928.088 MiB/s, ETA 1m45s
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Elapsed time:      1m28.2s
Transferring:
 *   planet-latest.osm.parquet: 45% /174.687Gi, 927.625Mi/s, 1m45s

The file downloads at approximately 900 MiB/s, completing the full 175 GB transfer in around 3 minutes.

Installation

Rclone is available on all major platforms. See the official installation guide or use your package manager:

# macOS
brew install rclone

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install rclone

# Windows (with winget)
winget install Rclone.Rclone

Usage

Every dataset page on OpenPlanetData includes an Rclone button next to the download link. Clicking it shows a ready-to-use command tailored to that specific file.

The general pattern is:

rclone copy \
    --buffer-size 0 \
    --disable-http2 \
    --http-url https://download.openplanetdata.com \
    :http:<remote_path>/<version>/<filename> . \
    --multi-thread-cutoff 0 \
    --multi-thread-streams 64 \
    --multi-thread-chunk-size 32M \
    --transfers 1 --progress

Key flags

• --multi-thread-streams 64 — Number of parallel connections. 64 works well for high-bandwidth links. Reduce to 8–16 on slower connections.
• --multi-thread-chunk-size 32M — Size of each chunk. 32 MB is a good default.
• --multi-thread-cutoff 0 — Always use multi-threading, even for small files.
• --disable-http2 — Forces HTTP/1.1, which allows true parallel TCP connections instead of multiplexing over a single one.
• --buffer-size 0 — Disables in-memory buffering to reduce RAM usage on large files.
• --progress — Shows real-time transfer statistics.

Adjusting for your bandwidth

Link speed	Suggested --multi-thread-streams
100 Mbit/s	4–8
1 Gbit/s	16–32
8+ Gbit/s	64

Higher values use more CPU and memory. If you see diminishing returns or errors, lower the stream count.