Why Airtable attachment links in a CSV export stop working

You export a view to CSV, the attachment column is full of links, and a day later every link returns an error. That is by design: Airtable attachment links expire. Here is what Airtable says, and what to do about it.

What Airtable changed

Since 8 November 2022, attachment URLs in a CSV export "will expire after a few hours". The same applies to the Web API: Airtable's developer docs say attachment URLs "will expire 2 hours after being returned from our API". Airtable's support article on attachment URLs promises the links stay active for at least 2 hours, but says the exact window may change. The reason is security: anyone with a permanent link could open the file without Airtable access.

What a CSV export contains for attachments

An attachment field is exported as text: the file name followed by a download link, for every file in the cell. The files themselves are not in the CSV. A CSV is text only, so it can't hold PDFs or images.

What this means in practice

Download files right after exporting. Airtable recommends downloading any attachments from the links in the CSV before they expire.
A CSV is not a backup of your files. It's a backup of your field values. Keep that in mind if the base holds contracts, invoices or photos.
Don't use the links as image URLs in a website, a spreadsheet image formula or another tool. They will break. Airtable explicitly discourages using it as a CDN.
Old exports still have the file names, so you can always see which files a record had, even when the links are dead.

How to keep copies of the actual files

Download them in bulk soon after an export. Airtable's attachment help article includes a Scripting extension example that lists every attachment in a view and generates a curl command per file. Run it, then run the commands within two hours.
Use a backup tool that copies files to Google Drive, Dropbox or S3. Tools such as On2Air back up attachments as files, which a CSV export cannot do.
Store the files elsewhere to begin with (for example a shared drive) and keep only a link in Airtable, if the files must stay reachable from outside Airtable.

Where scheduled CSV exports fit

A scheduled CSV export, from a script or from a tool like ViewCourier, has the same limit: the links in each file are fresh when the file is created and expire hours later. If the people receiving the file need the attachments, they should download them on the day the email arrives. For everything else in the record (text, numbers, dates, linked records, lookups) a dated CSV in your inbox every day or week is a simple off-platform copy. See automatic Airtable CSV backups.

Let ViewCourier do it

Connect a read-only Airtable token, pick a view, and choose daily, weekly or monthly at your time and timezone. Every run emails a clean CSV attachment to up to five people. The free trial lasts 14 days and needs no credit card.

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