archive.org cli downloads

Planted February 05, 2026 - Last Tended October 04, 2026

So say you want to trap somebody in a poll in The Sims 3 for Xbox 360, but your disc broke in half.

  1. You go to https://r-roms.github.io/
  2. You find https://archive.org/download/microsoft_xbox360_s_part1
  3. You find the zipped .iso file and try to download it using Firefox.
  4. The download starts strong, at 1 MB/s.
  5. Every time it gets throttled to death after 5 GB or so.

Turns out Internet Archive has an official CLI tool. It has built-in retries, and seems to be treated more loosely than the browser download. Configuration is simple, you just need an account (which you already had if you tried the browser download).

The identifier is the part after /download/ in the URL. But you can also search for it using ia search.

$ ia list microsoft_xbox360_s_part1
...
Simpsons, Die - Das Spiel (Germany).zip
Sims 3, The (USA, Europe).zip
Sims 3, The - Pets (World) (Beta) (2011-05-17).zip
...

I was afraid I’d have to pull the whole “S (Part 1)”, but you can specify which file you need (or even byte range). 

$ ia download microsoft_xbox360_s_part1 "Sims 3, The (USA, Europe).zip"

After that I’m usually getting a stable 300 Kb/s.

One thing I haven’t found out how to do is provide a target directory. Rather I always do

$ cd /run/media/boczek/Elements

There is also the [[torrent]]-based Minerva Redump but at this point I’m getting curious about archive.org’s architecture…

← (notes), (home)