HP launched it’s cloud-based online backup service, HP Upline, last week to a small fanfare - the backup client is not yet compatible with Windows Home Server (but can work if you want to hack it), but that’s not really a concern for us right now as news reaches us that the whole service has been temporarily withdrawn.
Tech Crunch reported a temporary suspension of the service yesterday, and we received an email from one user who has had his subscription refunded by HP with the following email:
“Dear HP Upline Service subscriber,
On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.
Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.
We truly value your early adoption of the Upline Service and will be providing the following to you: your subscription will remain in effect but we will be refunding your entire subscription fee. We will be refunding this amount to the credit card or other account you used to subscribe to the Upline Service.
Again, thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.
Sincerely,
The HP Upline Team”
So, a tricky start for HP Upline - it’s not the smartest thing to do to open up a data backup service and then withdraw access to your users’ own data. Right now, problems like this prove that cloud-only backup has its risks, and the safest option is a server + cloud combination. As for HP Upline, let’s hope they sort themselves out soon.
April 19th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I also had an email - a little longer stating that service was not supposed to be for anyone outside of the US…welll read it below….very dissapointed by HP on this.
________________________________________
Dear HP Upline Service subscriber,
On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.
Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.
If you are a resident of the United States, your subscription will remain in effect and you will be able to continue using the Upline Service for the duration of your subscription period once the Upline Service is operational again. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.
If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States. We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription. After we notify you that the Upline Service is operational again, you will have a limited period of time to access and download files that you have uploaded onto the HP Upline Service servers. After that time period, you will no longer have access to your present HP Upline Service account. If you would like to be contacted by us when the HP Upline Service is made available in your country of residence, please send us an email at help@upline.com. We apologize for any inconvenience.
_________________________________
Paul
April 19th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Same mail here about not being available in my region. Im dissapointed too.
Some digging later, and im not using Carbonite instead - It has the same specs including actual unlimited storage, supports Server 2003 (ie WHS), and has what appears to be a much more stable client (upline seemed flaky at best after a while, as it just kept closing itself). It doesnt have the fancy sharing stuff, but thats wasnt important to me.
I tried Mozy, iDrive and few others, but not many of them support Server 2003 without paying extra, and Carbonite has a nice interface.
Not sure its allowed, so please feel free to moderate it away, but if you sign up for a year from a friends code you are supposed to get 1 month free, http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUID=349816“>so heres mine.
April 20th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Same here. After two weeks, I received the mail from HP (I leave in Canada). It’s very frustrating. From a company like HP, I think it’s irresponsible and cheap to leave a customer just like that. Shame on you HP
May 4th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
It is back up, but there’s another glich. Because of a left over coding from the beta, it’s restricted to 50gigs for the basic account.
They say they’re working on it.