Previous threads here have made me decide to use a cloud storage instead of USB drives that I use to keep copies of my document files as back ups and also to keep files separate from my hard drive.

I use the free 15 GB from Google Drive as an additional place to store data but, obviously, I need more space. I've also used DropBox at work previously.

I decided on pCloud because for $250 you get 2T for life. For the price of 2 USB drives, I figure that's a great deal.

I started uploading from my computer and I immediately ran into difficulties. I don't know if this only applies to pCloud or to other services. I haven't got much help back from pCloud, I'll call them on Monday.

The main issue I see, is uploading to pCloud, it's showing an upload rate of 783 Kb/sec when my upload rate as tested is 6 Mb/sec. And I wasn't doing anything else on my computer. It showed it was going to take me 80 minutes to upload a 3.4 GB file.

Just to compare, I uploaded the same 3.4 GB file to my Google drive and it looks like it's going to take me also over an hour to finish syncing and it might even be past 90 minutes for it to finish.

Is my experience normal? Is there anything I'm doing wrong?

The complication with pCloud is that it uses a cache on my hard drive to store the data while it's syncing. So I can't just offload a 700 GB set of files on my USB and leave it running. That was the first problem it ran into when my 500 GB SSD ran out of space to store the cache and I didn't know about the cache.

I was at a Cyber Security class in December 2016 the instructor said...

All the big companies are pushing to be YOUR cloud provider. They know...once you make that decision it is unlikely you will move all your data to another system.

I did a fair amount of research into all of the providers in April 2017.

I went with Microsoft OneDrive for me and my two HS aged girls. Everybody gets 1T of storage and Microsoft Office.

No issues and I haven't looked back.

I have pretty much everything storied on OneDrive.

It works well with my iPhone.


Google Drive would have been the 2nd choice.

And then either DropBox or iCloud.

^^^ In that respect, I was going to go to OneDrive when Office 2018 comes up. For $70, I get full suite of Office plus 1 TB.

The $250 for 2TB lifetime plus crypto was too good to pass up. Plus I'm beginning to resign myself that it will take long to upload to the cloud. Like I said, I have 6 Mbs upload but my experience was at the office, I don't know what corporations upload speeds are. But I suspect it's significantly greater than 6 Mbs.

I also like how for $90, I can get 5 TB with Microsoft except that it's split between 5 accounts.

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:

The main issue I see, is uploading to pCloud, it's showing an upload rate of 783 Kb/sec when my upload rate as tested is 6 Mb/sec. And I wasn't doing anything else on my computer. It showed it was going to take me 80 minutes to upload a 3.4 GB file.

Just to compare, I uploaded the same 3.4 GB file to my Google drive and it looks like it's going to take me also over an hour to finish syncing and it might even be past 90 minutes for it to finish.

Just a guess, but... 80 minutes for a 3.4 GB file means you were seeing about 700 KBps (kiloBYTES per second).

700 KBps is about the same as 6 Mbps (megaBITS per second).

There are 8 bits in a byte. Upper case/lower case matters here.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

Just a guess, but... 80 minutes for a 3.4 GB file means you were seeing about 700 KBps (kiloBYTES per second).

700 KBps is about the same as 6 Mbps (megaBITS per second).

There are 8 bits in a byte. Upper case/lower case matters here.

If you did the math, then I believe you. Thank you very much.

And it looks like on smaller files, the time to upload is definitely quicker.

quote:

And it looks like on smaller files, the time to upload is definitely quicker.

It is not uncommon for cloud providers to “pace” large uploads by inserting delays (pauses) into the upload stream. This keeps you from monopolizing the bandwidth. I see it all the time when uploading to Office 365 Sharepoint.

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

Just a guess, but... 80 minutes for a 3.4 GB file means you were seeing about 700 KBps (kiloBYTES per second).

700 KBps is about the same as 6 Mbps (megaBITS per second).

There are 8 bits in a byte. Upper case/lower case matters here.

If you did the math, then I believe you. Thank you very much.

And it looks like on smaller files, the time to upload is definitely quicker.

It can be confusing that some thing are referred to in bits and others in bytes.

To make it worse, Ethernet speeds are each direction - 100 Mbps Ethernet is 100 up and 100 down. WiFi adapters advertise combined speeds. A 100 Mbps WiFi adapter is 50 up and 50 down.