Safari – resuming broken downloads

I got half way through the IOS SDK download last night, woke up this morning and it had failed. I tried everything from CURL to iGetter to try to resume the download, but none of it worked. Even going into Safari’s .download file and fiddling with the .plist inside (using a cloned paused download file) didn’t work.

The problem with using CURL was that the download is authenticated with your Apple Developer Account details, using session ID’s and cookies, so CURL isn’t going to help much there. I should imagine the fix I found would work for most files downloaded.

The eventual solution was the following:
1. Login to the Apple Account using Firefox.
2. Go to the same download link.
3. Start downloading the file (should go into your Downloads directory by default).
4. Pause the download in Firefox Download Manager.
5. Replace the .part Firefox download file with the extracted Safari file in the .download package.
6. Hit resume in the Firefox Download window.