The ups and downs of cloud storage as HP's Upline goes offline

David M Williams
Sunday, 08 March 2009 05:52

IT Industry - Market

Hewlett-Packard will be shutting down its online backup service at the end of this month, after less than one year in operation.

HP got into the subscription-based online backup service market after acquiring start-up Opelin in November 2007.

Opelin’s Titanize cloud-based file backup service became the basis for HP’s offering, titled Upline, which launched in April 2008.

Home and professional users paid fees between $USD 4.99 to $USD 8.99 per month for unlimited online storage. HP provided client software that uploaded and synchronised files with the hosted service.

Upline faced difficulty from the beginning with an entire week of downtime just three weeks in. At the time, users began dubbing Upline a good idea that was horribly executed.

The decision to close this month has not been explained by HP with the generic response being “HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.”

Upline stopped accepting new files from February 26th, with the restore facility only being operational now until March 31st, 2009. Users have until that date to recover any data they need. As of April 1st Upline will be no more.

Upline wasn’t unique, with competing services being available from EMC and other organisations. Symantec have announced their own offering to come, titled SwapDrive while Microsoft are working on Live Mesh.

Not all is well for the competition with Yahoo! also announcing the closure of their 10 year old Yahoo! Briefcase service this month too, albeit a day earlier on March 30.