HP has entered the online backup space with a new product called Upline. It’s a decent cloud-based backup product at a very good price point, but it has a few frustrating limitations.
The good news first: The software is simple to get started with (critical for a backup app) and the paid plans all provide unlimited storage for your documents, photos, music, and video files (also critical — who wants to count bits when signing up for data insurance?). The system checks for new files by default every 15 minutes, and uploads your data to the HP-run servers in a quiet background process.
There’s a free version that gives you a gigabyte of online storage for a year, but if you’re serious about backup you’ll want one of the paid versions. The least expensive $59/year Home plan gives you the unlimited storage and allows up to three PCs to share the online storage pool. Family plans and small office plans give you individual storage bins, and the business plans also give you an administrator’s dashboard.
The product allows Web-based access to your backed-up files, which is very nice if you want to grab a something when you’re away from your PC. You can also share files via email (recipients get links, not the files themselves) or publish files for public access.
Upline can also back up files to a local device, like a second hard drive, or a server or PC on the local network. I don’t know of other products that handle both local and Web-based backup. It’s a very cool feature.
The product is based on Titanize, which HP acquired when it bought the company Opelin last year. I’ve always thought Titanize was an under-appreciated backup app. Perhaps HP was listening.
Now, the flip side. The biggest turn-off is that Upline does not
backup email files. That’s planned for the future, but backup users
will need it now. Imagine losing your email archive. Enough said.
Another missing piece: System restore. Upline is a document and
media backup product. It won’t store your programs or system settings.
So if your hard disk crashes, you can’t use to rebuild your system.
The app doesn’t offer PC-to-PC sync (see FolderShare, BeInSync, SugarSync),
which to many is an obscure feature, but I think it’s one of the most
valuable data safety and convenience apps you can have on a personal
computer. There’s no virtual drive, like XDrive
has, which makes using the service just a little more tedious than it
needs to be. Also, it’s PC only on the backup side, although any
machine with a browser can view Upline archive pages. There’s no mobile
client. Finally, the search feature seems to only search on file names,
not files’ contents.
Upline is not a perfect backup tool nor a complete integrated
online storage suite. But at this price point, given its unlimited
backup space and its straightforward sharing options, it’s a good deal.
By
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April 8, 2008, 6:43 PM PDT
Source: Webware.com
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This review has been updated from the original: Information was added on backing up data to a local device.
The actual technical performance details are critical!
1. Upload performance is limited to only about 1 Mbs peak and
turns out to be only about 0.5 Mbs average. The performance
is limited by the Upline Client first and then by the server.
Even if the Client host and its Internet connection has the
capacity for higher performance the system is still limited
on only about 1 Mps peak.
2. The storage capacity is NOT “Unlimited” and at 50 GB an
error message appears indicating “Space Exceeded” by
more licences. While 50 GB may have seemed “Unlimited”
back in the 20th century to people using PC, in the
early 21st century 50 GB is not enough to backup the
user space for someone who happens to have lots of
digital pictures or digital audio not to mention
digital video and so on and on and not so useful.
3. And, an interested user might be curious about the
reliability of the upload process. While the files
to eventually get uploaded, the server reports
errors in the process and manual restart is needed.
Was the Upline system ever “stress tested” by even
a small number of users for a few weeks before it
was released as a system?
The answer is obvious … NO!