Interrupted Download? Here’s How To Resume In Chrome

Have you ever been in the process of downloading a large file in Chrome, then suddenly and without warning, your Internet gets disconnected or your computer hangs and you are forced to reboot? A download could also be interrupted by accidentally removing the electrical power cord from the wall socket or through power outage in your area.

When you finally get your computer up and running again, you agonizingly realize your download progress has disappeared and you have to restart.

If this happens a couple of times, a simple download can take ages to complete. If you are on a limited bandwidth plan or your carrier throttles your data after you exceed the fair usage limit, the consequences of an interrupted download can be expensive.

Unfortunately, unlike Firefox and Internet Explorer which allow you to easily resume interrupted downloads, this is one area that Chrome fails miserably. If you are a die-hard Chrome user, then the following workaround should help you avoid restarting a big download. Take note that I tested this in Windows 7.

WGet

This handy application is free and is part of the GNU project. Its primary purpose is to retrieve content from web servers. The name is a combination of the words “World Wide Web” and “Get”. Download the program and install it on your computer. Do not install it in the default programs folder. Select a different install location, because you will need to copy the failed download file to the same location as Wget’s executable file.

Locate the unconfirmed download file, paste it into the same location as the Wget executable file. Look in the Google Drive > GnuWin32 > Bin folder.

Rename it by deleting the “.crdownload” extension as shown below. Click Yes in the notification that pops up.

Next, in the download location folder, press and hold down the Shift key, right click and select Open Command Window Here.

A command window should launch. Type in the following command wget -c [URL], where [URL] is the download link, and press Enter. You can find the download link by going to your Chrome downloads page using the shortcut Ctrl +J.

You will notice that the download picks up where it left off before the interruption. Once the download completes, the command window closes. Confirm that file has been downloaded by checking the download location.

Can You Do It With An Extension or App?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a Chrome download manager that resumes interrupted downloads in same way a Firefox add-on such as DownThemAll is able do it. I tested out several popular Chrome download managers and they all failed to pick up a download at the point it was interrupted. The only option available was to restart the download. Chrome simply doesn’t have this functionality yet but we hope the developers will include this feature in the next release. This is yet another thing Chrome doesn’t let you do, that Firefox does.

Experimental Features

There is a Chrome experimental feature that is supposed to enable download resumption though I couldn’t get it to work in Windows 7. The feature can be accessed by typing “Chrome://flags” in your URL bar. This takes you to Chrome’s experimental features. Scroll down and look for Enable Download Resumption andclick Enable.

If this works, you should see a new context menu item labelled Resumeuponright clicking on the file in Chrome’s download page . But, like I said, this is an experimental feature and the developers make no guarantees on whether it works. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t work in Windows 7 and I am only including this information here for the benefit of Mac, Linux and Chrome OS users who may have better luck with the feature.

How Do You Resume Your Downloads?

Finally, if you need to download a really big file, for the moment it is best to use Firefox if your Internet connection is choppy. Alternatively, you could search online for the torrent version of the file and download it using a Bit Torrent client such uTorrent. This certainly adds a twist to the Chrome Vs Firefox Vs Opera debate.

Have you ever had to resume an interrupted download in Chrome?