CargoShip

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Downloading & extracting ​

cargoship download pulls files out of an upload and extracts them locally. It first fetches the lightweight manifest (~30 KB), works out which chunks hold the files you asked for, and downloads only those chunks — so retrieving a handful of files from a large archive never requires downloading the whole thing. The full flag list lives in the command reference.

bash
cargoship download S3_URL OUTPUT_DIR

Downloading a whole upload ​

bash
cargoship download s3://my-bucket/archives/uploads/20260721-a1b2c3 ./restored

CargoShip reads the manifest, downloads every chunk, decompresses, and reconstructs the original directory tree under ./restored.

Selective extraction ​

Most retrievals only need part of an archive. Narrow the extraction three ways — CargoShip maps your selection to the chunks that actually contain those files and skips the rest.

bash
# By glob pattern
cargoship download s3://my-bucket/archives/uploads/20260721-a1b2c3 ./logs \
  --pattern "*.log"

# By exact paths (comma-separated)
cargoship download s3://my-bucket/archives/uploads/20260721-a1b2c3 ./reports \
  --files "data/report.csv,data/summary.csv"

# By shard ID
cargoship download s3://my-bucket/archives/uploads/20260721-a1b2c3 ./restored \
  --shard-ids 0,2,4
  • --pattern — a single glob (e.g. "*.log", "data/*.csv").
  • --files — comma-separated list of exact paths within the archive.
  • --shard-ids — comma-separated shard IDs; useful when you already know a shard's contents from cargoship info --verbose.

Preview with --dry-run ​

Always safe to run first: --dry-run resolves your selection against the manifest and reports what would download without transferring anything.

bash
cargoship download s3://my-bucket/archives/uploads/20260721-a1b2c3 ./reports \
  --pattern "*.csv" --dry-run
Loaded manifest: 9,914 files across 10 shards
Pattern "*.csv" matched 128 files in 3 chunks (2 shards)
Would download 3 chunks (412 MB) → ./reports. No data transferred (--dry-run).

Add --verbose to list each file as it is extracted, and -r/--region to match your bucket's region (default us-west-2).

When to use restore instead ​

download works on files that are already in a readable storage class (STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, INTELLIGENT_TIERING, GLACIER_IR). If the chunks live in Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive, they must be thawed first — download cannot do that. It also selects only by pattern, path, or shard. Reach for cargoship restore when you need to:

  • retrieve from Glacier / Deep Archive (see Glacier & Deep Archive), or
  • select files by content hash, Git commit, or DVC pipeline stage.

See restore vs. download for the full distinction.

Best practices ​

TIP

  • Filter, don't fetch everything — --pattern or --files on a large archive saves both time and egress cost.
  • --dry-run before big pulls to confirm the match count and size.
  • Match the region with -r (or AWS_REGION) to avoid cross-region latency.
  • Reconstruct into a fresh directory so a partial extraction can't shadow existing files.

See also ​