Comments on: REVIEW: HP Upline Online Backup

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:55:41 +0000

Update. 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.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:23:50 +0000

Upline 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.

By: Lynn

Lynn — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:00:49 +0000

Upline 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.

By: erik

erik — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:22:59 +0000

I 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.

By: Ross Varic

Ross Varic — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:59:36 +0000

Sharon 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?

By: Lenovo ThinkPads to include online backup? Lessons from HP… « ElephantDrive

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:26:29 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Sharon Zukowski

Sharon Zukowski — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:43:42 +0000

Also 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.)