How to download BIG files from .onion websites

Well... this might sound silly, but I know for a fact, that I had some issues with downloading big files from .onion websites as well many people in the local infosec industry, so this one is for you.

Since this is very simple, I will ramble about the old days of the internet, when your modem went beep-boop-bop for a few seconds and you had a whopping ~6kbps download speed at max!

Some lucky bastards had dual ISDN that could rocket to ~12kbps, but even with such great speed, downloading big files was a big problem on the internet, every little disturbance on the telephone line could knock your download, even a small 2mb file could take up to 10 minutes to download:

That's when download managers have been invented, I personally used FlashGet:

It indeed was a great download manager, it allowed you to pause and resume downloads, use mirrors or multiple connections, it even had a nice looking UI.

Time went by and there were dedicated peer-to-peer programs to sharing files. Today, we mostly stream our content, we have high bandwidth internet access and even if we need to download a big file, most up to date browsers support resume download, that in case the server support and allow it.

But here come the issue, somewhere along the way, the TOR network was created, it was used mostly for web content.

"Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication by directing Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays^[5] in order to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis."

This means, that the traffic is routed randomly around the world, between several servers, this means that downloading big files from TOR is nightmare.

The download speed is unstable and varies.

If there is some connection problem between relays, your download is stopped.

Well, you might say, you can click on the resume download in TOR FF download manager like in regular FF. While this is true, de facto, this is nonsense. I had recently a case of a 70GB file I tried to download, in 2 days I managed to get 16GB of it, while hitting at least a hundred times resume download. This is a "monkey" job, while we are all monkeys at some ways, I prefer to spend my time "eating bananas and shit".

I also closed TOR browser by mistake, this reseted the whole process :/

I tried several things in the past:

I tried to use download managers on windows, but not a single one support .onion natively.

I tried to use a local TOR relay on Linux with combination with wget/curl but this also didn't work too well.

But this time it hit me, why not use both??? :)

On windows you need to edit the torrc file to add a listening port, than download a download manager that allows routing traffic through a socks proxy, and add your local socks proxy you just created.

I used IDM.

Voila! now your download manager support .onion as well.

On Linux you can simply run TOR as service without the need of the browser and set it as a proxy for you download manager of choice, choose wisely.

njoy :)