Slow iOS Picture and Video Uploads

[Phillip S.4]

I'm running iOS 13 on an iPhone XS. Dropbox app is up-to-date. Location services are set to Always Allow. I noticed that I had a backlog of 127 pictures/videos that had not yet been uploaded. I decided to turn off the auto lock so my screen would never turn off. I left the Dropbox app open on my nightstand charger all night. When I woke up, it had uploaded one video, knocking my queue down to 126. Yay...

The upload progress indicator continuously stops and reappears. It seems to upload at a rate of about a megabyte a minute. Here is a screen recording I took of the behavior.

If I use the Fast speed test app for iOS by Netflix, it indicates my WiFi speed is 200 Mbps up and down (which is what I pay for from Frontier FiOS). Amazon Photos appears to keep everything synced without my ever having to open their app (I opened it for the first time in a month to check on it and yeah, all my pictures were there).

Edit: I should mention I don't pay for iCloud so I have disabled "iCloud Photos" and the "My Photo Stream" features in Settings.

[Lusil]

Hey @Phillip S.4, thanks for checking in with us. 

Out of curiosity, how large are the videos you're trying to upload? Did you manually add them or did they upload automatically via camera uploads?

Keep me posted!

[Phillip S.4]

@Lusil

"how large are the videos you're trying to upload?"

They vary from a few hundred MB to almost 2GB.

"Did you manually add them or did they upload automatically via camera uploads?"

I shot the videos with my iPhone's camera, so I expect them to backup automatically in case something happens to my phone. I have not attempted to upload anything manually. When I open the Dropbox app, these are just the uploads Dropbox tells me I have remaining.

I have used about 21% of my 2TB Dropbox Plus plan, so I am not concerned about running out of storage. I just really want to make sure the videos of my one year old walking around are backed up. Transferring via USB cable is painfully slow (because Apple just really likes USB 2.0 I guess), so I was hoping the cloud storage service I pay for (Dropbox) could help me out here.

[Lusil]

Thanks for getting back to me, @Phillip S.4. 

Have you tried toggling the option to Upload Videos off and back on again?

Could you also check if there is a change in the speed of the uploads if you connect via cellular data or a different WiFi network? 

Looking forward to hearing back from you!

[Phillip S.4]

I had an opportunity yesterday to try uploading with LTE. It was slightly faster to upload than my home WiFi. It still does the weird start and stop thing, but it uploaded a little more between stops.

Here is a short video showing it in progress on LTE.

https://youtu.be/0SX0ek_EIJs

[Phillip S.4]

I'm noticing that my home wifi seems to be uploading a bit faster now than it did when I made my first post. Not sure what has changed on my end. It still isn't keeping up whlie the phone is locked, but if I leave Dropbox open it looks like it might catch up if I left it on overnight like I did in my original post.

What I find very strange is how many connections my phone seems to make to Dropbox server while uploading. Watching the connections on my router, I can see my iPhone make about 24 HTTPS connections to 162.125.8.14 but only 1 or 2 ever seem to be uploading any data at all. Then it stops and a different connection uploads at about 40Mbps for a second, then another. Here's a screenshot of connections from my phone.

Is that normal behavior? Seems a bit inefficient, but then I'm not an enterprise storage engineer guy.

[Lusil]

Thanks for your detailed post, @Phillip S.4.

Based on your screenshot, it could be how your device interacts with the connection, or your connection behaves during this process.

In any case, could you make sure that ‘Background Uploading’ is on?

[Phillip S.4]

It is enabled, yes.

[Daphne]

Thanks for checking on that @Phillip S.4!

Can you let me know which version of the mobile app you have installed? Also, exactly what version of iOS is your device running?

I can suggest trying to reinstall the mobile app, but from the info that you've provided it's most likely an issue with the Internet connection.

Let me know what you find!

[Phillip S.4]

Under the Settings inside the Dropbox app, the "App Version" field says "200.2.2"

I am on iOS 13.6

There's been a modest improvement in upload speed since I opened this ticket. The main thing is how bad it is at uploading in the background. Even with all the Location Services and stuff enabled, Dropbox will never keep up with the videos I'm shooting unless I disable the auto-lock and leave the screen on overnight on the charger. The next time I do that and it's all caught up, I will delete and re-install like you suggested.