Architecture to Allow High Availability File Upload

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has found any information on how to architect a system to support high availability file uploads. My scenario: I have an Apache server proxying requests to a bunch of Tomcat Java application servers. When I need to upgrade my site, I stop and upgrade each of the Tomcat servers one at a time. This seems to work well as Apache automatically routes subsequent requests for the stopped app server to the remaining app servers that are up. The problem is that if a user is uploading a file when the app server is stopped, the upload fails and the user has to upload the file again. This is problematic as uploading files is an integral feature of the site and it's frustrating for the users to have to restart  their uploads every time I upgrade the site (which I want to be able to do frequently).

Has anyone seen any information on how this can be done or have ideas on how this can be architected? I imagine sites like Flickr must have a solution to this problem as I have seen presentations they say that they are able to upgrade their site several times a day without the users noticing.

Thanks!
Tuyen