HP's Upline to Get Permanent Downtime

HP's Upline cloud-based backup and storage service, which was launched last April, is about to fold, without even making it to its first anniversary.

According to an email sent to subscribers (even free ones, like me!), HP will halt backing up of users' files to the HP Upline servers as of February 26, 2009, 8 AM PST. The service itself will continue with only its restore functionality operating until March 31, 2009. Interestingly, given their timing on halting backups, I received the email on Feb. 26th at 7:51 AM PST. Thanks for the early notice!

HP Upline was competing with smaller, yet well-reviewed services such as Mozy and ElephantDrive, but apparently never garnered enough market share to merit keeping the service alive.

It's unclear if the recent move of ISPs toward usage caps has had any effect on these services. I personally decided to just do more backups at home rather than rely on any of these services as Comcast has a 250GB monthly usage cap. With the amount of data I have, I'd be in the penalty box at least for the initial backup (after that, of course, backups would be incremental).

Here's the text of the email I received Thursday:

HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.

HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline.

If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx.

HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.

Thank you.

HP Upline team