04 May 2008
Backup Review Rating (1 Star out of possible 5) Reviewed on May 03, 2008 Tries to do too much: Please click here to download the PDF format version of this review Hp Upline used to be called Titanize and was the product of a company called Opelin that was acquired by HP last year. At $59 per year for unlimited capacity, it’s $10 more expensive than Carbonite and $5 more expensive than Mozy Home. There is a “Family plan” that backs up 3 PCs for $149/yr, and a Business version that starts at $299 per year for 3 PCs. HP Upline tries to do too much – backup, file sharing, photo sharing, publishing, and so on. It doesn’t do any of them really well. We gave Upline 1 star out of 5. As a backup service, it lacks most of the basic features and ease-of-use of pure backup services like Carbonite and Mozy. For collaboration, file sharing, syncing, publishing, and so forth, it isn’t nearly as slick as the new SugarSync or BeInSync products. When we first signed up, their whole system went down for several days. HP said that they had an “isolated problem”, but blogs indicated that a customer who was attempting to restore his data actually got someone else’s data – if true, there’s probably nothing that could be worse for a backup company and not likely to inspire confidence.
There’s a basic problem with products that try to combine backup with publishing, photo sharing, file sharing, and the like: all this other stuff just makes life complicated if all you want to do is protect the data on your PC. Test Results: The installation itself wasn’t complicated, but it did take a while. The HP Upline website mentions the only requirements are“A PC running Windows 2000, XP or Vista, with at least 60 MB of free disk space,” but it actually also requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, the VC++ 2005 SP1 Runtime, and MSI 3.0. It automatically installs them for you, but it took almost ten minutes for us. Installing .NET Framework is a BIG install and likely to put off many potential users. None of the other backup services that we have reviewed require this. All in all, including signup and installation, it took us 13 clicks to get started with HP Upline. The initial scan of our PC put a noticeable drain on the CPU. We were trying to write this review at the same time and decided to stop the scan because it was causing the PC to drag noticeably. Upline does not sense when the user is attempting to use their PC for other work and automatically move to a lower priority mode – a refinement available from other vendors. We first had Upline back up 10MB of files; it took 5 minutes and 45 seconds. The compression of the files took 31 seconds, it took another second to encrypt the data, and 5 minutes, 13 seconds to actually send the compressed data. That’s about 250 kbps, about 1/3rd of the upstream bandwidth of our DSL connection. It’s certainly not in line with what we have come to expect from any of the big names in online backup. Backing up 100 MB took 45 minutes; yielding a slightly better backup speed – 296kbps, but still less than half of my available bandwidth. The backup interface itself wasn’t easy or simple; there is no way to backup files (or see if files are backed up) outside of the HP control panel itself. It took seven clicks to backup a single new file, and we had to enter our HP Upline password to make the change. Upline doesn’t back up email, and you can’t tell Upline to back up a single file unless you have already added its type into a separate window of the interface. Restoring files was pretty easy; any files that are available for restore appear right in the main status window. Unfortunately, you can only restore files to their original location. This fits most of the common recovery goals, but restoring them to new locations is a nice benefit and allows users to have more control over their files. And if you have backed up from an XP computer and are restoring to a Vista computer, you will definitely have a problem because the file structures are different and default folders have different names to start with. Interestingly enough, it took a minute longer to restore my 100 MB than it did to back it up: 46 minutes. The fact that HP’s uploading and downloading bandwidth was symmetrical, as well as the fact that we achieved significantly lower speeds (in either direction) than we had with other backup solutions, leads us to believe that HP throttles Upline’s bandwidth. Of course, they have every right to set their bandwidth, but when we need to recover important files, we’d like to be able to restore them as fast as our internet connection will allow. Throttling the upload speed might be a good way to limit the exposure of offering “unlimited” backup, but there is absolutely no point in limiting restore speed. Other “unlimited” vendors have told us that the average user backs up around 25-30GB. At HPs speed, a full restore of 25GB would take 8 days running 24 hours a day – versus less than 2 days for Carbonite or Mozy. Unlike most other services, HP Upline does not offer a private encryption key option. If you are a lawyer, health care professional, or anyone else who is required to keep a private encryption key (or just paranoid), Upline is not for you. Upline does not keep previous versions of your documents – they keep only the most current version. If you accidentally overwrite a document that you are working on, you can’t go back and get the version from yesterday. Most of the major backup vendors now offer versioning. Upline does not back up locked or open files. To back up the file you are working on, you must close the file first and click “Backup”. Upline cannot back up your Outlook .pst email file since that file is almost always open and changing frequently. If you have a large file and you make a change to it, Upline must back up the whole file again. Mozy, Carbonite, and others back up only the changed portions of the file. Sharing and Publishing could be viewed as Upline’s advantage. To publish files, you select files to publish and they are posted on http://library.upline.com for all to see. There is a pretty nice-looking search bar that allows you to find any person’s files. Upline also provides a URL at which anybody can access each of your particular files. However, it is cumbersome to get a file’s URL from within the Upline program itself. The problem is, if what you really want to do is sharing and remote access, there are much slicker products on the market, including Microsoft’s SkyDrive which offers 5GB of free space. Summary: General Tags: online backup, online backup companies, compare online backups, software as a service, top rated online backups, online data backup, online file storage, data security, CEO interviews, online backup providers directory, SaaS, data storage, online backup news, online backup services, online file backup, online backup reviews, cloud computing, backing up online |
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7 Responses
Sharon Zukowski
June 19th, 2008 at 8:43 am
1Also be warned that if your computer fails and you have more than 4GB of data, (I had 26 GB stored, note that I say “had.”) that you can’t retrieve all of your data. You have to check off each file, about 20-100 at a time and then retrieve them. You have to restart your computer after each group. I have almost 17,000 files. If you do the math, it will take me about 1000 hours to retrieve my files from Upline. My question, to myself is why didn’t I just stick to my handy portable hard-drive. Sigh. Pass this around. I am a not very techy or savvy computer person and I hope others like me won’t be ripped off like this. (There is no warning on the site about retrieval time.)
Lenovo ThinkPads to include online backup? Lessons from HP… « ElephantDrive
June 25th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
2[...] HP bought a company and launched its Upline online backup and storage service to much fanfare. Unfortunately, the service fell flat on its face and was taken down pretty much immediately and the guys at BackupReview.info panned it. [...]
Ross Varic
July 6th, 2008 at 11:59 am
3Sharon is right — you can’t just start a “complete restore” job, come back in the morning and find it done. This is THE most basic function of a backup service and all the serious players do this easily and quickly. Maybe Upline does have photo-sharing, but I already use Flickr for that, and it’s much better than Upline. How you can call Upline a data protection product when you can’t even back up and restore everything on your computer?
erik
November 4th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
4I would also not recommend Upline under any circumstances. I was lured by the price and assumption that HP couldn’t mess up data-backup too bad; right? I should have reviewed backupreview.info before signing up.
Well, my hard drive cashed a month after backing everything up. About half of my images are on my remaining external drive, but there isn’t a way to simply back up one lost directory and everything in it – without individually selecting all the files within that directory.
When you’re talking thousands of images, this doesn’t work. Also if you select ‘Retrieve All’ it starts fetching them, but then stops after several hours. I.e. you can’t just let it run all night.
Also, my new computer I’m trying to restore to is 64bit Vista – which isn’t supported. I had to buy another external drive and take it to work to run with XP.
Avoid like the plague – it’s not ready for big time.
Lynn
November 19th, 2008 at 2:00 am
5Upline support is miserable, no one knows what is going on. “Research team” never gets back with solution. System “upgraded” 9 days ago, and hasn’t worked since. Error message pops up every five minutes, and I cannot remove the program from my PC! A real disaster.
Dave
January 8th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
6Upline is a nightmare. I started using it in April, 2008 and in December I had accidentally deleted some files on my PC. I thought, “no problem, I’ll just recover them with Upline”. Ya, right.
The service just flat out doesn’t work. Like others, I can only get a few files to download at a time before I get timeouts our decompression errors, and then the whole process stops. I have over 30GB backed up, representing 6000+ files. Do you think I can get them all restored? Not a chance.
Also, HP does seem to be throttling bandwidth during the restoration process. Unbelievable! When you have a catastrophe, the last thing you want to do is wait for the restoration to complete. Plus, the fact you have to babysit the thing the whole time is unacceptable.
Check out HP’s Terms of Use for Upline: “YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT THE SUBMISSION OF ANY CONTENT VIA THE SITE OR SERVICE, AND THE DOWNLOAD OR UPLOAD OF ANY MATERIAL OR CONTENT THROUGH THE SITE OR SERVICE, IS DONE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK AND THAT YOU WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE TO YOUR CONTENT…”
They can’t guarantee that your backup is safe and they push all liability back onto you. Huh?
Do yourself a favor and backup your data with someone else or find another strategy. HP has completely lost it.
Dave
January 29th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
7Update. It has been a couple of weeks and HP’s Upline Support (if you want to call it that) has yet to provide a fix or explanation to my issues, which date all the way back to December 2008.
I urge you to take a pass on Upline. Don’t be fooled by their promise that all of your files are safe. I have no way to recover my lost memories through their service, and they truly don’t give a damn.
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