Restarting a Download Manually in Firefox

What I’m abount to discuss is probably a fairly rare event but when you are stuck in a corner it’s good to have knowledge like this at your disposal. So, the background: I was downloading a very large video file in Chrome (about 13GB), it had got to about 12.5GB when I noticed that my local network had become unresponsive. For reasons that I can’t fathom (yet) I’ve discovered that rebooting the router makes everything work again – I think the router is on it’s last legs and will need replacing soon.

I wander over to the router, switch it off and have a head slapping moment. If I’d just left it a few more minutes I’d have finished the file and I could switch it off without any problem. As it was Chrome had a fit and just stopped downloading the file. I searched around for ways of resuming the file to no avail, it looked like I was stuck with 12.5GB of useless video file.

I read a post about restarting files in Firefox but people claimed it only worked if you had the .part file that Firefox creates. I, of course, didn’t have the .part file I just had a plain file. Thinking a bit outside the box I decided to rename my original download then start the download again in Firefox. After letting it download a little bit of the file (just enough to create the part file) I paused the download, deleted the .part file Firefox had created and renamed my broken download so that it had exactly the same name as the .part I’d just deleted. Upon resuming the download Firefox started at the end of the file and finished the download perfectly.

In the future I’m going to use the FlashGot plugin for Firefox for any non-trivial downloads.