Our download server at https://download.geofabrik.de has excerpts and derived data from the OpenStreetMap dataset available for free download. Most of these files are updated every day – any change you upload to OpenStreetMap should be on our download server the next day.
Data on the download server is organised by region. The root directory contains files that have a whole continent's data in them, and for all continents except Antartica there are subdirectories in which you find individual files for various countries. Some countries again have their own subdirectories with data for administrative subdivisions. For Germany, all "Bundesländer" are available as separate files, and for England we have all individual counties. For France, we have all (historic) Departements. The file for Germany's Baden-Württemberg region is, for example, at
https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/germany/baden-wuerttemberg-latest.osm.pbf
Please let us know if you are interested in other regional excerpts that we do not offer right now – we might be able to add them with little effort.
Files with the .osm.pbf suffix are OpenStreetMap raw data files in the
PBF format.
They are the common format for OpenStreetMap raw data and need few memory for storage.
Daily diff updates (.osc.gz, Gzip compressed OSM XML) are available on our
download server as well. They contain the changes of one day. The PBF files can be updated with them.
Files ending in ".osm.bz2" are bzip2 comressed OpenStreetMap raw data files.
The XML based data format is described in the
OSM Protocol Version 0.6
article on the OpenStreetMap wiki. The XML DTD is available in the
OSM Protocol Version 0.6/DTD
article.
Our download server offers raw data as Bzip2 compressed
OSM XML
(file name suffix .osm.bz2) as well. They need more storage space, their processing is not
as efficient due to the usage of the XML format. They are offered for backward compatibility with
older software. We recommend to switch to the PBF format.
You need special software to process OSM raw data. It is usually command line and server software for Linux. Common tools to process OpenStreetMap raw data are:
Tutorials for common use cases can be found at switch2osm.org. Plese get in touch with us if you need consulting or commercial support.
Files ending in .shp.zip are shape files that you can process with almost any
GIS software. In converting OSM data to shape files, we have made a default
selection of layers containing most important layers (road and railway
network, forests, water areas, many points of interest). We offer more comprehensive shape files and shape files
of other regions than provided on the download server are available as a paid service.
OpenStreetMap raw data usually comes with metadata. Some metadata fields are obviously related to persons (user name, user ID, changeset ID).
The raw data files (.osm.pbf, .osc.gz, .osm.bz2) on our public download server (download.geofabrik.de) do not contain these fields.
Our free shape files do not contain any metadata at all.
Because the metadata fields are needed by OpenStreetMap contributors for analysis (e.g. fighting vandalism) only, we offer raw data files with all metadatafields and regional excerpts with full history on a separate download server protected by password at osm-internal.download.geofabrik.de. This free service can be used by OpenStreetMap contributors only.
All OpenStreetMap derived data on the download server is licensed under the Open Database License 1.0. You may use the data for any purpose, but you have to acknowledge OpenStreetMap as the data source. Derived databases have to retain the same license.
