CloudFiles allows granular control over the download, print and text copy settings of your files. Using the app, you can switch off downloads which automatically turns off printing & copying abilities as well. You can also re-allow downloads at any time by using the same toggle which turns everything back on. Additionally CloudFiles also provides a feature of making your file directly downloadable.

In this article, we cover how to disable and enable download settings. We show how this settings takes effect and how it also affects copying & printing ability. Finally we cover the direct download feature and what it can do.

You can use a simple switch on the Link Settings page to enable / disable downloading of the file. The following GIF shows how to access the link settings page. This page contains various security and analytics related configurations of the link. This also shows the download toggle which is usually on the top.

This will remove the download button in the CloudFiles document viewer and your recipient will not be able to download the file. This is illustrated in the 2 images below.

The disable download option is available on folders and dataroom links as well. Disabling download on a folder or dataroom link will disable download of each file inside that folder & dataroom. Additionally, it will also disallow download of folders as zips.

Files not renderable by browsers (eg. ZIP files) will get downloaded automatically. They will also not have the option of disabling downloads in the link settings.

There is no download option available when creating CloudFiles links from URLs. Hence the options of enabling / disabling download is not available on the settings of such links.

Disabling download also disables the ability to print the document. A CloudFiles webpage which is displaying a document can be printed by using the standard print functionality in the browser. While this does not provide a perfect PDF to get generated, this is still a security risk for people who intend to disable any unauthorized distribution of the file content.

To tackle this, CloudFiles also disables any printing capabilities when download is disabled. E.g. For a hosted PDF on CloudFiles, if download is disabled and the viewer tries to print by pressing Ctrl + P in their browser, it will show a white, blank document as shown in the image below.

Disabling download automatically disables text copy on your PDF. While the text can be copied on a downloadable PDF, it cannot be copied from a non-downloadable file. This is illustrated in the GIF below. In the first part, we show a document with download enabled and hence text can be copied. In the second part, we show one which has download disabled and hence the cursor cannot copy the text

When a readable file such as PDF, Word Doc, PPT etc... is uploaded to CloudFiles, the app by default treats it as a rendered file. I.e. this file can be opened and read in the browser. Thus whenever you try to access the link of the file, it first opens in the browser.

However there are certain business use-cases in which rather than opening the file in browser, you'd rather have it auto-download. CloudFiles supports this requirement as well. File Links can be set to direct download in which case rather than the PDF opening up, the file is directly downloaded.

This feature is only available on CloudFiles Enterprise Plans for security purposes. The graphic below shows this feature in action.