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Bringing down the cloud: HP's Upline down for a third of its life

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

April 22, 2008, 4:35 PM

HP Upline hosted storage has been suspended for five days (and counting) allegedly due to some potentially disastrous bugs. Already, competing services are attempting to cash in.

The service from Hewlett-Packard offering unlimited online storage of user data was launched only 15 days ago, and has been out of commission for just over a third of that time.

Upline's Web interface was the first to go, then service backups, until only live phone support was available. Users were notified via e-mail of the service's suspension ("suspension...will be temporary and short in duration") and then were offered a refund while keeping their subscription in effect, for what it's worth. Non-US residents were offered no such refund.

HP has not officially cited the reason for the service's suspension, but in a comment to TechCrunch last Friday, member Ridz may have proven to have experienced Upline's fatal flaw: His application was connecting him to another member's account.

"I'd decided to get the personal account and marked out 27 GBs worth of data to sync. After several days of upload(amounting to 7GB), I noticed the progress bar go right back to 0%." That's when Ridz noticed he was suddenly on someone else's account; he could watch the sign-in take place automatically, but he couldn't stop it.

Reinstalling the desktop client software resulted in Ridz' 7 GB of information showing up on one register, but when he attempted to re-sync, that 7 became a 0 again. Now, HP's online assistants are just as incapable of logging onto Ridz' space in the "cloud" as he is.

"I'm just wondering if anyone else got logged into my account and if my data could have somehow ended up in someone else's account (which would be disastrous)," he wrote. He says he has since switched to a different service.

Today, in an obvious attempt to capitalize on the disgust from Upline's early adopters, a Sponsored Link on a Google search of "HP Upline" yields a site with the tag line "Is Upline jerking you around?" linking to a company called Mozy offering a similar service.

Perhaps with the early failings of HP's well-known brand name, users will be ready to use services from lesser-known, but more specialized online backup companies such as these.

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By Second Shadow

posted Apr 23, 2008 - 2:35 AM

Tim,

was the "gclid=CJq8zOux75ICFQP4lgodXFZu4A" in the Mozy's link you posted accidental or deliberate?

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Apr 23, 2008 - 8:12 AM

It is the url you get if you follow the ad for mozy on google, as mentioned in the article.

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Apr 22, 2008 - 7:21 PM

As my brother likes to say, HP was once a great engineering company. I can see that is the truth no longer.

Score: 0

By Neoprimal

posted Apr 22, 2008 - 5:55 PM

There is one reason really.

Everything else you can lose in an 'insert natural disaster here'....your flash drive, your external hard drive and your PC. Granted, you may not LOSE everything, you may be able to save something - but, you also may not. So remote backup is like a 'safe', albeit a safe that someone else may have a code to, but a safe nonetheless. If you stick with a responsible reputable place then who knows, you may get lucky and end up with a good deal. It's a big risk, but if you live in places prone to acts of God (like a flood/tornado) or otherwise (like say, a fire), then online backup may save you.

Score: 0

By Lawrence01

edited Apr 22, 2008 - 5:31 PM

Why ANYONE would want to actually put their stuff who knows where and without being able to physically grab the hard drive is beyond me. Maybe in a few specialized circumstances, nonetheless, I would want it fully encrypted so that no matter what happened, no one else could read the data. If you need to access your data remotely, maybe getting a 16 GB flash drive would be easier, and it can be fully encrypted and no worry about losing an on-line connection or be at the mercy of someone else if that service goes down.

p.s. external hard drives are not expensive, especially if you have to consider paying a monthly fee to something else. You can get free back-up software to make things easier like SyncbackSE.

Score: 0

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