About the service
How long does it take to process my archive?
Mostly it depends on how fast your connection uploads the files. The processing itself is considerably quicker than the upload.
The honest version: the upload is almost always the slow part, not the processing. People expect the opposite, and then spend the wait watching the wrong number.
A 30 GB archive over an ordinary home connection with around 20 Mbit/s upload speed takes several hours to send. On fibre with 100 Mbit/s upwards it is more like three quarters of an hour. Your connection is what decides, and it is worth knowing before you start so you are not sitting by the computer waiting for nothing.
Two practical tips: use a cable if you can, since wifi often halves the upload speed. And start the upload when you are going to be doing something else anyway. It is not something you need to watch.
The processing itself is faster. Photos go quickly, video takes longer. An archive with a lot of video therefore takes longer than one with mostly photos, even if the two weigh exactly the same number of gigabytes.
You do not have to keep the page open. We email you when the archive is ready to collect, and it then stays there until you have fetched it, though for 48 hours at most, since we delete automatically.
We deliberately give no exact number of minutes here. It depends on your archive, your connection and how much video you have, and a figure we cannot keep is worse than no figure at all. What we can say is that nothing about it requires you to be present.