Downloading Maps - Batch

[garrett63376]

I'm a TopoFusion newbie so be gentle with me.

I checked out TopoFusion a few weeks ago and pulled the trigger on the Pro version last night. My hope was to be able to download enough map data to make TopoFusion useful while I'm bicycling through Utah, Arizona and California this summer. I'll be spending much of my time off the grid so having local data was the selling feature for me.

After a pretty much fruitless 24 hours of trying to download map data, though, I'm beginning to doubt TopoFusion is going to work out for me. I don't think it's necessarily a TopoFusion problem, though I've had a number of miscellaneous freezes and crashes, but the public domain map servers seem pretty weak.

Case in point, I selected a region of Utah for download, used the default selections in the resulting dialog and I'm getting data at a whopping 8-16 kbps. Given that the relatively small area I selected will require nearly 4 1/2 GB of data, I'll be back from California before this one download finishes. My internet connection is great, I just downloaded a 2 1/2 GB ISO image from Microsoft in about 20 minutes, so I doubt the problem is on this end.

So the question is, is this normal?
Is there another source for map data, free or otherwise, that TopoFusion can use and that I can download in a reasonable amount of time.

Any help/suggestions would be most appreciated. 

[Blender]

I, too, am a new user and have been experiencing the same thing the last few days. I began by attempting to download my entire state (az) in one batch. I looked around for physical media, but couldn't find any. I am was thinking about trying to find somebody local who could load up a hard drive for me.

this aftenoon I was downloading at a crawl, but after 10 pm it picked up speed wise.  Topofusion called out a 3GB download and is on track to finish it in an hour.

[ScottMorris]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the posts.  I would say it really depends on the map server.  Some are not very well suited for batch downloads, some are.  I think a few of the main ones have some 'throttling' code in place, meaning they let you download fast for a short while, and then severely limit it.  That's to prevent people from hogging the server load and/or making large copies of the data.

I would try the older style topos (from MSRmaps.com) and possibly after hours as Blender suggests.  I haven't seen any throttling with MSRMaps.  For aerials, I would go with Open Aerial.  That server is pretty reliable and quite fast.

Hmm, after writing that I just realized that batch downloads are not active for several of the newer servers.  For MyTopo it is intentional -- our agreement with the kind folks there prohibits it.  Same goes with Open Street, but I will have to check with the Open Aerial server.

The Color server and also US Topo is where I've seen the throttling.  But I have seen good results with the basic Topo sets.

Let us know how it goes guys.  I will plan to do some testing myself and see about adding a few of the other servers to batch download.