There's no reason to believe we'll find a way to transfer the consciousness rather than make a copy of it (or something that is indistinguishable from it to an outside observer).
When you upload your consciousness, you're left behind to die. When you use a transporter, the transporter kills you. Your consciousness ends with your body. Lt Barclay in Star Trek was right to be afraid of the cloning death machines.
The question, I guess is, whether the knowledge that an exact replica of yourself will live on for eternity is good enough for you. Or whether you're religious enough to forego our understanding of the physical world and believe in the existence of a non-physical "soul" that will automatically attach itself to the copy when the host is destroyed (though this creates all kinds of questions if the host isn't instantly destroyed during the process of the "upload").
My question about uploading consciousness is in the transition point. As I sit here in front of my computer could I click a button and upload my memories and consciousness to a computer? Would they for some reason leave my body at the same time? Would it be instantly fatal? Why?
Wouldn't I really just be forking my consciousness? One version of me would continue forward inside a computer with the memory of the transition and the corporeal me would continue wondering if it even worked. The corporeal me would still die at some point but I could die with the satisfaction(?) that I created a copy of myself at some point in time.
I'm not sure that's much different than writing a book and having children.