Online Encyclopedia
Uploading and downloading
This article is about the computer terms. Download is also an industrial band led by CEvin Key. Uploading is also a hypothetical transfer of a human mind into a computer.
The terms upload and download often create confusion, as their definitions depend on the context.
Download and upload refer to the transfer of information between computers.
The person/computer sending the information refers to the transfer as an upload, while the person/computer receiving the information refers to it as a download.
These are the definitions used by ISPs. If the customer is sending information, it is an upload; if they are receiving information, it is a download.
Most people use the term download when they are receiving a file, and upload when they are sending a file over the Internet.
In either case, information is transferred both ways to manage the download. This is often the reason people get confused.
An exception is when talking about data transfers between space vehicles and ground stations; in this case, every transfer from the space vehicle is a download, while every transfer to it is an upload.
As a noun, a download or upload is the information transferred or the act of transferring it.
In surfing the World Wide Web the term downloading is not usually used for simply bringing up a web page, but rather for transferring a larger file and/or directly saving it. In a network, the term downloading is not usually used for copying files from one network device to another even if one computer is acting as a host (see copy.)
See also
To upload files to Wikipedia, or for instructions on this, see the Special:Upload page.
To download Wikipedia database, see http://download.wikimedia.org.