What happens to a big file
Anything 50 MB or larger is cut into chunks and sent several at a time, and each chunk retries on its own — up to ten times, backing off between attempts. A brief drop in signal costs seconds, not the file; most connection problems are absorbed without ever surfacing. A stalled percentage with a speed still showing is a slow patch, not a failure.When an upload does stop
If a chunk exhausts its own retries, the upload pauses. Any pieces still in flight are allowed to finish first, so you get one clear error rather than four, and it tells you where it stopped — something like “Stopped at 62% — retry to resume.” You then choose:- Retry continues from what has already landed. The chunks that made it are kept, so a file that stopped at 62% goes back to 62%, not to zero.
- Skip abandons that one file and moves on to the next. The job is still created and everything else still uploads; you can add the skipped file from the job’s Files tab afterwards.
- Cancel stops the run.
The one thing that costs you the file
There is no resume across page loads. Closing the tab, reloading, or navigating away discards the progress on the file that was in flight, and that file starts from zero when you next upload it. The submission window says so: keep it open until it finishes. Nothing else on your machine needs to stay still — you can work in another window or another browser tab. But leave the submission window alone, and stop your computer going to sleep for the duration. A laptop that sleeps mid-upload is the most common cause of an interrupted submission.If it was interrupted anyway
You have not lost the job. The job row is written before any file is sent, so an interrupted submission leaves a real job sitting in Draft with whatever files got through already attached to it. It appears in your Active list like any other job. Open it, and a banner across the top reads “Draft — Submission Not Completed” with a Complete Submission button. Upload whatever is missing from the job’s Files tab, then use that button to finish. Submission Errors walks through the whole recovery. The point worth remembering: never start a fresh submission after an interruption. Finish the draft. Starting again gives you two jobs for one proceeding, and re-uploads gigabytes you had already sent.Giving an upload the best chance
- Upload from the machine the file is actually on. Sending a 6 GB file across an office network or from a network drive adds a second link that can break.
- Use a wired connection if you have one, or sit near the access point if you don’t. Mobile tethering is the least reliable option.
- Turn off sleep and screen-lock timers before you start a multi-gigabyte upload.
- Send files individually rather than bundling them into an archive. An archive is never unpacked anywhere in the process, and its length can’t be read, so the form holds you at “Set a duration” until you enter the total by hand.
- If you can’t get a large file up at all, don’t keep fighting it. Registering the recording as physical media and posting the disc is a supported route, not a fallback — see File Types and Limits.