It's not unheard of for more bandwidth to be used on the API than the entire rest of the site combined.

Do what I do, archive it off. I made a wallpaper randomizer that would pull a random wallpaper via the API from Gelbooru every ten minutes. After running it for a day, I realized very quickly that I need to give it the ability to filter by tags, lol. Anyway, it logs all the papers it chose then each night I can scroll through the results and tag any artists whose works I like. I then take the artist list and run it through another app I wrote then view all the artists' works and download all the ones I like.

I have over a hundred thousand images archived so far. I'd love to be able to just download the whole database & file system, lol.