If you:
- have a bunch of files in S3
- and you use the AWS CLI to download them
- and the target filesystem is NTFS
- and they have colons in the file names
then they will appear to download correctly but they will all show up as being zero bytes large even though the “size on disk” is a nonzero and potentially large amount! And the reason for this is that the colons result in the file contents being stored in alternate data streams which is NTFS’s most deranged feature, and…there’s basically nothing you can do about this? The CLI tooling doesn’t let you rename the files during transfer unless you do every file individually. The web UI doesn’t let you download a zip. You can download one file at a time but if you have tens of thousands of files? Hahah sorry bucko. You’re pooched. Hope you didn’t want those files. Hope they weren’t important email archives.