diff --git a/utils/general.py b/utils/general.py
index 686e6829d052..2cbe517e4952 100755
--- a/utils/general.py
+++ b/utils/general.py
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
 from scipy.signal import butter, filtfilt
 from tqdm import tqdm
 
+from utils.google_utils import gsutil_getsize
 from utils.torch_utils import init_seeds as init_torch_seeds
 from utils.torch_utils import is_parallel
 
@@ -854,7 +855,9 @@ def print_mutation(hyp, results, yaml_file='hyp_evolved.yaml', bucket=''):
     print('\n%s\n%s\nEvolved fitness: %s\n' % (a, b, c))
 
     if bucket:
-        os.system('gsutil cp gs://%s/evolve.txt .' % bucket)  # download evolve.txt
+        url = 'gs://%s/evolve.txt' % bucket
+        if gsutil_getsize(url) > (os.path.getsize('evolve.txt') if os.path.exists('evolve.txt') else 0):
+            os.system('gsutil cp %s .' % url)  # download evolve.txt if larger than local
 
     with open('evolve.txt', 'a') as f:  # append result
         f.write(c + b + '\n')
diff --git a/utils/google_utils.py b/utils/google_utils.py
index 6012f14e1ad1..1630ab7ca5b8 100644
--- a/utils/google_utils.py
+++ b/utils/google_utils.py
@@ -4,12 +4,19 @@
 
 import os
 import platform
+import subprocess
 import time
 from pathlib import Path
 
 import torch
 
 
+def gsutil_getsize(url=''):
+    # gs://bucket/file size https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/du
+    s = subprocess.check_output('gsutil du %s' % url, shell=True).decode('utf-8')
+    return eval(s.split(' ')[0]) if len(s) else 0  # bytes
+
+
 def attempt_download(weights):
     # Attempt to download pretrained weights if not found locally
     weights = weights.strip().replace("'", '')