Uploading and downloading

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In Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Uploading images and Wikipedia:Database download.

"Upload" and "Download" redirect here. For other uses, see Upload (disambiguation) and Download (disambiguation).

Uploading and downloading are related terms used to describe the transfer of electronic data between two computers or similar systems. More colloquially, they are sometimes applied to transfers to/from removable media such as CDs.

1 Download
2 Upload
3 Extensions
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Download

To download is to receive data from a remote or central system, such as a webserver, FTP server, mail server, or other similar systems. A download is any file that is offered for downloading or that has been downloaded.^[1]^[2] The word's primary usage comes in the form of a verb. Increasingly, websites that offer streaming media or media displayed in-browser, such as YouTube, and which place restrictions on the ability of users to save these materials to their computers after they have been received, say that downloading is not permitted.^[3] That is, "download" is used to mean "receive and save" instead of simply "receive".

[edit] Upload

The opposite operation, to upload, is to send data from a local system to a remote system, FTP server, or website. For example, "Uploading a video to Wikipedia" means sending a video to the website.^[4] The difference between uploading and downloading is downloading means to receive and uploading means to send.

[edit] Extensions

When applied to local transfers or copies, for example "Uploading all pictures from the digital camera to the computer" or "Downloading the edited pictures to CD", the "up" and "down" prefixes may be used indifferently, though one convention is to use "uploading" for transfer from a smaller to a larger storage medium and "downloading" for transfer from a larger to a smaller storage medium.