(This repo was created on July 19th, 2021. I had to overwrite history because of sensitive information committed by accident)
This is a python code sample showing how to retrieve binary files from Salesforce in Bulk.
Currently when you issue a query API call and the SOQL statement contains a Base64 field (i.e. VersionData on ContentVersion), you can only retrieve one record at a time. This means if you want to retrieve 20 files from Salesfeorce, you will need 20 API calls.
However, Salesforce does have another API call to get around this limitation. The retrieve API call allows you to retrieve multiple records with a Base64 field included.
The algorithm for using these API calls together would be to query all other fields first and then grabbing the set of Ids from that operation and then issuing a retrieve API call that gets the Base64 field for multiple records. So in this case, you would only be consuming 2 API calls. One for query and one for retrieve