How to download all salesforce.com report metadata for extremely large orgs?

I need to download all reports for an org with a huge number of reports. If I try to download them all with Eclipse I hit the max retrieve limit.

I can get everything I need by manually selecting a small subset of reports using the 'Add Package Components' eclipse wizard, and repeatedly retrieving them all. However, given it takes a long time for each retrieve this is an extraordinarily laborious process. Does anyone have any better ways to 开发者_开发知识库handle this? Perhaps something ANT based?

Yeah, the ant deployment tool is the way to go. It has good documentation and can handle extremely large orgs.

One trick that I use in big orgs: for metadata components that don't support "*" in the package.xml file (e.g. reports), you can use the "project contents" wizard in Eclipse to build your package.xml for you using the checkboxes (just make sure you don't say "Yes" to downloading the whole shebang), and then copy that Eclipse-created package.xml to your SF ant tool directory.