How To Download and Overwrite Existing Files by Default in Chrome

When you download a file in Chrome, it automatically gets saved in the default download folder. And if the file has already existed, Chrome will change the name of the downloading file by automatically adding “(1)”, “(2)”, etc. to the end of the filename. There is no setting available in Chrome to change this behavior, nor any flags existed.

So what to do if this is not what you want Chrome to do? You would like to overwrite any file existed when downloading a file to the default download folder, just to keep the folder less-cluttered.

Downloads Overwrite Already Existing Files is a Chrome extension that lets you just do that, prevents duplicate file downloads in Chrome by overwriting them if existed. You will end up with a single file you downloaded the last.

There is no action needed to make it work. Add it to Chrome is all you need. You won’t even notice any differences when downloading same files until you check the download folder. While the download page in Chrome still shows the same number of files downloaded, the actual folder only keeps the last one downloaded.

It’s worth noting that the extension also fixed a bug in Chrome where it will remember your previous download folder, rather than defaulting back to the default download folder.

Alternatively, if you don’t like having another single extension just for one purpose, you can enable one option that tells Chrome to ask where to save the file before downloading.

Go to the Settings page (chrome://settings/), select Show advanced settings at the bottom of the page, and scroll down to the Download section. Then check the option “Ask where to save each file before downloading“. And yes, you may be annoyed after a while having to select folder each time when you download a file from Internet.