Download all files in Jupyter Notebook

During a course on Coursera I wanted to keep the Jupyter Notebook content for later reference and download it with all files to my own computer.

There are a lot of suggestions on how to download Jupyter Notbooks and files online but none of them really helped for this course as there were a lot of symbolic links that I wanted to download as well. For most of the solutions I found online the content for the symbolic links in the Jupyter Notebooks simply downloaded as references and not the files themselves.

So after a bit of research I came up with this. This worked for me and downloaded everything including symlinked content.

This is for the course Convolutional Neural Networks on Coursera. Note that Third and Fourth cell will not be needed in most cases. But in the course Sequence Models it is needed to remove some symlinks that links to themselves thus creating an infinite loop.

Here is what to do to download all Jupyter Notebooks and all files including symlinked content:

First create a directory named utils Then create a notebook in that directory and run the following cells (replace the names of the folders you want to copy)

First cell

# make directories for downloads
!mkdir downloads
!mkdir downloads_zip

Second cell

# copy files
!cp ../week1 downloads/week1 -R
!cp ../week2 downloads/week2 -R
!cp ../week3 downloads/week3 -R
!cp ../week4 downloads/week4 -R
!cp ../dummy downloads/dummy -R
!cp ../readonly downloads/readonly -R

Third cell

# list symbolic links pointing to itself (if there is nothing here there is no need to run the next cell)
!cd downloads/ && find ./ -type l -exec sh -c 'readlink -f "{}" 1>/dev/null || rm "{}"' -- "{}" \;

Fourth cell

# remove symbolic links pointing to itself (if any)
!cd downloads/ && find ./ -type l -exec sh -c 'readlink -f "{}" 1>/dev/null || rm "{}"' -- "{}" \;

Fifth cell

# copy files again and this time also download symlinks content
!tar -hcf - downloads | tar -xf - -C downloads_zip

Sixth cell

# gz the files
!tar cvfz downloads_zip.tar.gz \
    'downloads_zip' \

Seventh cell

# split the files in order to be able to download them
!split -b 200m downloads_zip.tar.gz downloads_zip.tar.gz.part.

Eighth cell

# run this in your terminal on your local machine in the folder you downloaded the gzip parts (might be different on Windows - this works for Mac)
# cat downloads_zip.tar.gz.part.* > downloads_zip.tar.gz

Ninth cell

# clean up
!rm -rf downloads/
!rm -rf downloads_zip/
!rm -rf downloads_zip.tar.gz
# repeat the above line for all parts as well