Downloading on a device that is not yours

The question to settle before you paste anything

A video file has to be written somewhere, and on a machine you do not administer that somewhere is decided by rules another person set. Work out the destination first. Everything else on this page is a version of that one question.

Open your browser's downloads view and look at where the last file went. That folder is where yours will go. If the browser is set to ask each time, you get a chooser when the transfer starts, and that is the moment to point it somewhere you can reach later.

A school or library machine keeps nothing overnight

Shared computers in schools and libraries are commonly rebuilt to a clean state between sessions. A file in the Downloads folder of such a machine survives your sitting and disappears at some point after you leave. Treat that storage as a shelf you are borrowing for an hour.

Take the file with you in the same sitting. A USB stick is the plainest route: let the transfer finish to the machine's own disk first, then copy it across, then delete the original. Choosing the stick as the download destination directly works, and it fails messily when somebody pulls the stick out partway through.

Anything you leave behind is readable by whoever sits down next. Delete the file from the Downloads folder before you log off, and empty the recycle bin or trash if the machine has one.

A phone with almost no free space

The size on each row is the size the file will occupy. Read that number, then check what your phone has spare in its storage settings. A phone reporting under a gigabyte free has room for a short clip and no room for an hour of video.

Pick a lower row when the margin is thin. A 720p row of the same video is a fraction of the megabytes of the 1080p row and plays at full quality on a phone screen. When the video is only worth listening to, an audio row, where the source publishes one, is smaller again.

A phone that runs out of space during a transfer ends up with a partial file that plays for a few seconds and stops. Clear the space before you start rather than during.

A locked-down work laptop

Managed laptops usually block software installation and browser extensions. Neither matters here, because everything happens on this web page and on our servers; there is no installer and no extension to add.

What a managed laptop does affect is the destination and the network. Some builds redirect downloads into a monitored folder, and some block downloads of certain file types outright. Your browser reports a blocked download in its own downloads list, and that message comes from the machine's policy rather than from this page.

Company networks also filter which sites can be reached. When the page holding the video is blocked on that network, the reading fails before any of this becomes relevant.

The checks worth making first

Four things, in order, on any device you did not set up yourself.

• Find where the browser writes downloads, and confirm you can open that folder.
• Compare the free space on the drive or phone with the size printed on the row you want.
• Decide now how the file leaves this device: a stick, a cable, or your own cloud account opened in another tab.
• Confirm you can stay at the machine until the transfer ends, because closing the tab stops it partway.

What the machine's owner can see afterwards

We ask for no account and no email address, so nothing here identifies you. The device is a different matter. A managed computer keeps its own browser history and download log, and a network administrator can see which sites the machine reached.

That is worth knowing rather than worrying about. Save material you are entitled to save, take the file with you, and leave the shared storage as you found it.

Related pages

• Why there is nothing to install
• Finding and moving the saved file
• How the browser handles the transfer
• Reading the size figure before you commit
• Taking sound only when space is short