by Leo A. Notenboom

The scenario is simple: you examine your downloads folder and find a number of files with a digit appended in parenthesis:

and so on.

Why? Your browser is preventing you from accidentally losing something important.

When downloading a file your browser may add a (number) to the filename to avoid overwriting a file with the same name if one exists. You can simply work with that, or you can use “Save as…” to save your downloads to a location and with a name you specify.

Download a file, and you’ll get that file.

Download the same file again, and the browser needs to make a choice:

Most browsers do the second. The download just works, and you’ve not lost anything.

If you’re literally downloading the exact same file, it probably doesn’t matter, but there’s one important scenario where it might.

Let’s say you’ve located some program on the internet that you want to download and install. You download it, and find that the downloaded file is called “SETUP.EXE”, which is very common.

Now, sometime later you find another program, perhaps completely unrelated to what you were doing earlier. You download it, but its download is also called “SETUP.EXE”. What’s a poor browser to do?

Again, it’s #2 that most browsers adhere to. This way you can have both SETUP.EXE’s, but the second download will simply have a slightly different name: “SETUP (1).EXE”. It’ll still work just fine.

This is about more than document or setup programs. ANY file you download that has the same file name as a file in the Downloads folder (or whatever folder you choose to download to) will cause this to happen.

The solution is simple: either right-click and “Save as” your downloads, so you can choose the location and filename before writing the file to disk.

It might also be enough to just realize that this can happen, that it’s nothing malicious, and in fact it’s the browser preventing you from overwriting a file you might want to keep.

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