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  • Are VPNs and download managers considered abuse?

Those of us on slow connections have to download videos in order to watch them without buffering issues.

I use a VPN on my browser, but not globally on my system (I don't trust the VPN software to install it system-wide).

I've been worried that grabbing the download link from the browser which is on VPN, and downloading it in a download manager (or just plain wget), would get my account flagged a potentially sharing download links with a third party, because the IP that is downloading the file would be different from the IP that grabbed the download link, nor will it send the same cookies.

Is that somehting that could get my account suspended if I were to do it?

Also, I wonder if it's okay to download from a local NAS server directly instead of downloading on the laptop then copying over to local NAS. That too might look suspicious, but it would help save time. Grab the download link and wget it on the NAS server.

@cdlamer Hi 👋
It is better not to use download managers or download directly from a local NAS server.
Indeed, the system may consider it abusive.
Can you please specify why you need a VPN to download a file?
Using a VPN while downloading may affect your download speed.

    AlexSLR my connection isn't that good to begin with so the VPN won't be the bottleneck. I just tend to leave VPN on. I'd rather have it on all the time than forget to turn it on when it's necessary.

      AlexSLR anyway thanks for letting me know, I'll stick to downloading using the browser.