Direct Shareable Links

Owned by Andy Tseng
Mar 21, 2024
2 min read

Direct sharable links allow the sharing of data through a URL.

When you download data via a direct shareable link, it will download the data into a container (zip, tar or aar (Arcitecta archive)). After downloading the container you will have to unpack it.

Direct shareable links are a poor way to distribute big data because:

  • The data are packed in a container and so you need double the storage
  • If the process fails (very likely over a long time) you have to start over
  • We do not recommend direct shareable links for anything more than a few tens of GB as they are not robust.

There are a variety of methods to download the data via the URL, but the simplest is to paste it into your browser and press return; this will activate a download process managed by the browser.

For more advanced users familiar with Unix command-line tools (which you might use in a script), such as curl or wget, here are some examples.

curl "https://mediaflux.researchsoftware.unimelb.edu.au/mflux/share.mfjp?_token=pkPfWMlGGoHZvroPbDNP112871145" -d browser=false -o DesktopTraining.zip
  • you must use the argument -d browser=false for this to function.
  • put the URL in double quotes as there may be characters in the URL that must be protected from the shell
wget -O DeskTopTraining.zip "https://mediaflux.vicnode.org.au/mflux/share.mfjp?_token=pkPfWMlGGoHZvroPbDNP112871145&browser=false"
  • If the embedded URL has a &filename attribute, it won't be used and you have to specify the -O <output file>.

You need to unpack the container to access the data

  • You can get the tool to unpack Arcitecta aar containers from our downloads page
  • Almost all operating systems support unpacking zip or tar files (either with double-click via graphical interfaces or command-line tools)
  • The container will be unpacked into a structure reflecting the original data.