The man page for the knife download subcommand. the knife download subcommand is used to download roles, cookbooks, environments, nodes, and data bags from the server to the current working directory. it can be used to back up data on the server, inspect the state of one or more files, or to extract out-of-process changes users may have made to files on the server, such as if a user made a change that bypassed version source control. this subcommand is often used in conjunction with knife diff, which can be used to see exactly what changes will be downloaded, and then knife upload, which does the opposite of knife download. syntax this argument has the following syntax: