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So how the hell do I upload 250GB of photos to them without dying of old age?

Slow and steady.

At 2Mbps upload it's only about 12 days.

I've never had an upload to anything make it past 4-6 hours without some kind of hiccup, crash, or 404 from the host, much less 288 hours. And that's not counting transport errors on my side (I'm on WiMax). Assuming Dropbox can recover from partial uploads, I'd still expect an entire month or longer to get it all uploaded.

Now what happens if it's a terabyte? I'm supposed to saturate my upstream for 3-4 months?

Wait... this isn't one giant terabyte zip file we're talking about right? This is a bunch of 3 - 5MB jpgs, some 75MB-300MB video files? That accurately describes the media I have starting from 3 years ago when my daughter was born.

A failed upload only interrupts the file currently being uploaded, not the previously successful ones.

Agreed. "Assuming Dropbox can recover from partial uploads" meaning Dropbox can pick up where the upload stopped and keep going. But let's say it's halted at 99%, if Dropbox has to re-check every single file from the start to see if it's in sync, then there's gonna be a penalty there too.

Syncing files is pretty much Dropbox's core business. Of all the things to worry about them getting right, that one wouldn't concern me.

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