Odrive web interface and downloading in bulk

We’re new to odrive and still fleshing out the details – one obstacle we’re stuck on at the moment and cannot find an answer in the documentation is with bulk downloading from the web.

Short question: how can one download groups of files or entire folders (and thus subfolders) from the odrive web interface?

The detail: Our use case for our small two-person consulting business is sharing engagement files with our clients. We internally use Dropbox to keep all of our business files synced across the two of us and all our devices. Within that master folder, we have subfolders for clients. We found odrive helpful to fill the password-protect gap in the free Dropbox plan, so now we can link to that client folder and allow clients to to get all their files over the web with password protection. Within that client folder are many files and folders, so single file download is not feasible. Is it possible for them to download entire folders?

Further, we tried to duct-tape this by zipping all of the files and putting that in the main directory. But when downloaded, the files and folders inside are all zero-size .cloudf files, so not sure if this is an oddity with the selective un-sync on the premium trial or what, but right now we have no answer.

Thank you!

Hi @chris.rosenbaum,
Thanks for reaching out.

We don’t yet offer a way to recursively download all items in a shared link. When using the Google Chrome browser, we provide an option to download all of the files within the current folder you are in:
It look like this:

For zipping up the folder, you would need to make sure you had locally cached (downloaded) all of the items inside the folder you want to zip up, so it is not just zipping up placeholder files. https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-your-odrive#section--sync-all-files-and-subfolders-

This would be more work for your clients, initially, but you could also share the storage out as an odrive “Space” and they can link it directly into the odrive desktop client, so that they can access the data natively on their computer. https://docs.odrive.com/docs/share-with-odrive#section-share-storage-with-spaces