Is linking necessary to download files?

Two other things I just noticed:

- You don't seem to actually be constructing your client anywhere that you've shared. E.g.:

    self.restClient = [[DBRestClient alloc] initWithSession:[DBSession sharedSession]];
    self.restClient.delegate = self;

- You're printing out the contents of the local file immediately after kicking off the API calls, but note that these calls are asynchronous, so you may be reading that data before the API call finished to download the latest version. That may be the "caching" you were referring to before.