Factors that can affect the speed of your uploads are:

  • Size of the data - larger files will obviously be slower to upload
  • Number of files - more files are significantly slower as the archive has to analyze each file
  • Location of the data - files on a network drive or external drive will take longer to download
  • Speed of your network connection

So to speed your uploads there are a few things you can do:

Compress your files before uploading

Putting your files into an archive such as a Zip or Tar.gz file will help by reducing both the number of files uploaded and the total size of the files. Uploading an archive will be faster but to retrieve any of the files you will need to download the whole archive and extract them after downloading.

Copy your files to your computer before uploading 

Uploading files from your local computer, or an external drive, is significantly faster than from a network drive, so if possible copy your files to your local computer before uploading, especially for data sets with large numbers of files.

Use a better network connection

On-campus connections come in a few speeds, the fastest being a cabled network connection to a Gigabit network port, then a cabled connection to a 100megabit port, followed by wireless connections. If possible always use a cabled connection, and for very large uploads try to use a computer with a gigabit network connection. Network connections can be upgraded to gigabit speed, but this may incur a cost for some areas, please contact your local IT support or the UNSW IT Service Centre (9385 1333) for further information.

 

Help and further information:

  • To learn more about the Data Archive:
  • To access the Data Archive Web application, use this link, or, go to the Home page for other access options
  • To create, or update, a Research Data Management Plan go to the ResToolkit service
  • Note: the Data Archive service is also available over SFTP, see the SFTP client guide for more information