I occasionally have need to download a backup from an instance where I can’t ssh. Pulling 2GB down over my home internet connection where speedtest.net claims I get almost 500Mbps down isn’t that painful, but pushing it back up a 20Mbps is.
I thought that I might be able to use curl and pass an API key to download the backup, but what it gets is a redirect in an HTML document, and trying that URL in curl ends in a “bad request.”
I just had this problem too trying to pull a backup from a machine that was not my machine (so no SSH access). It was further complicated as I use Brevo as the email provider and they mangle the link to redirect to their own server for tracking.
For the backup emails, it might be useful to explicitly show the full URL and token instead of hiding it in the a href which can be overritten by email providers.