Where did my download go?

I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. “I can’t find my download that I spent hours waiting on to finish. How do I find it again?” Well there are many ways that I can answer this. The simplest one is to remember where you saved it, but I know that’s not always possible. So instead what I’m going to do is list a few of the simplest methods to use to keep track of and find your downloads.

First of all, know your browser. Your browser is the program you use to surf the web, whether it be (IE) Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, AOL and the like. Every browser has some method of handling your downloads using a built in download manager. Throughout the different versions of each browser, there download managers have changed from a little bit to a lot, and the download managers can vary from browser to browser. But for the most part there are two basic methods to use it.

When you click on a download link it will do one of two things

1) It will just save the file in a standard location for all of your downloads (Usually in the My Documents folder, or a downloads folder inside the My Documents folder.)

2) It will ask you where to save the file. If you just click the save button it will save the file in the last location you saved a download to.

Depending on how your browser is configured in the options, you can do one of four things to find your download.

1) If it’s configured for option 1 above simply look in you’re My Documents folder.

2) If its not there than you can use the file search tool provided by your operating system.

3) Or you can open the browser’s options panel and there should be a spot in there to tell it where to save downloads to, Simply look there to find out where your downloads being saved to.

4) If it’s configured for option 2 you can go back to the website you got the download from and click on the link again, this time pay attention to where it wants to save the file and just don’t click on the save button and then open that folder that it wanted to save to, and your file should be there.

Some browsers like FireFox, you can click on the “Tools” menu button on the top of the browser window and then choose “Downloads” to open up the list of resent downloads and then you can right click on the file and choose “open containing folder”.

I hope that this was helpful.