I’m a big fan of online backup of critical data — I use Amazon S3 to back up the 300gb or so of personal files I couldn’t bear to lose — but as these sort of sites proliferate, you have to be careful to pick one that’s going to be around for awhile. Case in point HP announced it is shutting down its HP Upline service. I’m not too familiar with this service, but I assume it is similar to the program that Dell and other computer manufacturers have these days where they try to upsell consumers an online backup system when they’re purchasing their desktop or laptop.
According to a press release via Web Worker Daily,
HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.
HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline.
If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx.
HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.
Frankly, that’s a relatively short time frame for making copies of anything on their servers. Some of us are fortunate to have 20mb download through our ISPs, but not everyone does and intensive users of the service might find that is a cutting it close (along with the hassle of suddenly having to devote a good portion of time to the attendant issues in creating the restore volume, etc., etc.)
And if HP couldn’t make this service work (which doesn’t surprise me), how do you think those services offering unlimited storage for $5/month are going to be doing 6 months from now?
Online backup is definitely a useful tool to have, but it shouldn’t be used as the only backup method and you have to consider how likely it is the company hosting your data will still want to/be able to in the short and long terms.
