HP’s new online storage service Upline has been having quite the growing pains over the past few days.
We’ve heard that the service’s web interface went down several days ago, although the backups continued to function. But as of yesterday, everything appears to have gone down except for the telephone support, which doesn’t provide any information beyond an assurance that the engineering team is working on the problem (with no ETA for when it will be resolved).
This isn’t the greatest start for a service that absolutely needs reliability to survive.
Are you an HP Upline user? Please share your experience in the comments.
Update: Here’s an email sent to users:
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.Sincerely,
The HP Upline Team
Must be a slow friday at Mikey’s house.
@Jan – nothing wrong with that =)
I guess they had a few headaches… as the service is relatively new… I am not surprised.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
– I know you know my IP address –
I expect this from HP. Their products and services suck. HP is an unethical company too.
Wow down already, that was quick…
HP could certainly do better… it’s HP..
I was going to sign up for it, but it was down. So I can’t be a customer – tragic.
I actually commented on the previous entry but i think it’s worth saying it here as well.
I’d decided to get the personal account and marked out 27GBs worth of data to sync. After several days of upload(amounting to 7GB), I noticed the progress bar go right back to 0%. Upon checking I realised that the app had suddenly connected me to some other person’s account. Since I set it to auto-login, i could see the sign-in take place but couldn’t terminate it.
So what did I do? I tried to log in to the remote access(their website). But instead of the screenshot you posted there was actually a message stating something along the lines of “We’ve got a lot of response and need to do some upgrades so the remote access will be down till the 21st April”. I guess now, it’s going to be down for quite some time.
Anyway, I wrote in to them via email. No response for 24 hours. In that time, I tried to uninstall the upline desktop client…but I couldn’t(it just got stuck at ‘gathering relevant information’. Thankfully, the installation file could do a repair. After that I got the software to work fine…except that now, it was stating that i had 7GB stored online but sync-ing was re-started from 0% again.
Then I realised they had an online enquiry form. Used that, and they finally got back to me. But they didn’t what the problem was…and they couldn’t empty out my account either. Since then, i’ve sent them some error logs that they requested for and a screenshot of the mismatch between the web account and the sync-ing. I figure, I can only delete when they get the remote access thing back up.
I’m just wondering if anyone else got logged into MY account and if MY data could have somehow ended up in someone else’s account(which would be disastrous.)
Over the past 3 days, i’ve switched to using Syncplicity.
FWIW TechCrunch Commentbase, we at ElephantDrive have endured while Upline went offline. And as a matter of business practice – we tend to respond to our customer service requests in less than 24 hours. Our customers seem to appreciate that.
Trust your data to a service that has been proven with over a year of users hammering away at it. Trust your data to a service that distributes your data across geographies and even across other storage (as a service) providers like Amazon. Trust your data to ElephantDrive – not only will we keep it forever, we’ll even let you access it in real-time, whenever you want. Imagine that.
/rant
Try our service out TC User. If your data’s not safely tucked away, available for your immediate access when you need it, I’ll buy you a coffee of your choice from Starbucks next week at Web 2.0 in SF.
cj little
VPoA, ElephantDrive
cj at ElephantDrive dt com
If you interested in a service like this that’s free, may I suggest MIT’s dropbox? It’s basically a file system interface (i.e., intuitive and easy) and it’s free (up to 2GB). Now that doesn’t help with the 27GB guy, but for me, who just wants to share documents between all of my computers in an easy and obvious sort of way, it’s great. Get it here (in private Beta):
http://getdropb...om/beta/webware
Here is an email I just received from HP. I will discontinue my use of this product asap.
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.
Sincerely,
The HP Upline Team
the thought of launching a web service based on that is scary.
Here is the email I just got – slightly different (full refund):
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
“We truly value your early adoption of the 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…”
This the most ignorant email i got since years even when i compare it with one of those support replies tickets…, this supposedly professional email from a giant company like HP is unprofessional, rude and I encourage people and companies outside the United States to boycott HP for such treatment!
eBay is making lots of profits from the huge numbers of HP laptops and desktops that are being sold on their new condition in prices 50% and + less than the market value….!??! (No need to comment further…)
While other companies are investing outside the US especially at these times, HP decided to send this email because of their poor and unstudied service that doesn’t belong to them in the first place!
HP, you are loosing it!
Hi, everyone,
I’ve experienced downtime, too, but the letter that landed in my inbox seems suspicious. First, there is no corporate branding, just plain text. The return address is upline-paypal@hp.com. I assume that users can pay with PayPal (I have a free account) but am I overly jumpy here? Do you think this is really a legit letter?
@10 : brock, thanks! I’m already using getdropbox as a means of sharing sync-ed files for project teams. I like it’s version-ing capabilities
Anyway, yeah I just got that email about discontinuation too. Oh well…
I wrote about it on my blog (in ITALIAN): http://www.giov...zio-vergognoso/
haha should have gone with http://www.jungledisk.com
I paid money for my Upline account, only signing up as i thought “It’s from HP, it’ll be properly supported and wont go bust”. Ha, I was too optimistic.
Its true that I live outside the US but i remember putting in my address and paying with my French credit card. It’s clear that they let too many people join, and now they are back-tracking by saying it’s US only. The first signs of a problem happened early on the near-unusable, and the closed Remote Access. For them to “turn it off” on the 17th with NO news for a further 48 hours is just not on.. I’m fuming, but glad I’m getting my money back so i can go elsewhere.
confusing as hell!! talked to tech support…was even more confused,,i use mybloop.com
The computer is personal again!
Ohh sure as hell, this is what i call personality. I have the pleasure of spending 5+ days on getting a paid account to work. I subscribed to a trial/free accouht to see the application, then i decided to buy the “home” version.
After i bought it, i took 5+ days to get it to work, this involved 1 transatlantic phone call and 5 mails. Then i finally got a response from someone that could do something. And that still took 24 hours to come into effect.
And this is where i get angry, nowhere i could find did it mention the “limitation” to US only. When i was getting “support” it was never mentioned either.
If their own success killed them they must be very unprofessional. You do not create such a service without having a plan in case it´s to big to handle.
The only thing they should have done is just close for signups. Simple and effective, now they are pissing everybody down their backs. Not to mention themselves. The HP brand has suffered in my view.
As a sidenote, i am surprised the downtime could go unnoticed by the “web” for 48 hours, this is a big deal.
I thought the client was great, and was pretty close to signing up, i didn’t even realize it wasn’t supposed to be available to me (in canada). Filtering tools? Whatever!!! I also sent them an email early on stating i won’t use any service that doesn’t accept special characters in their passwords, how lame is that…
However, i couldn’t get the client easily installed on my box at home, so i had been slow to pay just waiting for an hour to fart around with it – perhaps it was actually their service hiccups that caused my issues. My initial install of the client was fine on my vista laptop (surprisingly).
In any event, i think the lack of transparency in their shutdown notice is really bad for business. If they have to cut something off so blatantly like that, they should really provide some rationale as to why they’re taking such radical action.
Boo HP, why do you make it so easy to dislike massive corporate entities?? Yay little guys!!!, i think i’ll try some of the services listed in these comments!!!
Hello, I’m a user of HP Upline in Canada and I was so happy to see such a great service offered by HP and it worked the way I like, but now they say goodbye to me….! So much for my backups as HP backed down! I’m very dissapointed as a consumer and await now to see what HP will do about alienating us… :/
I tried HP Upline but I live in Canada and I have discovered they have now pulled the plug on me. Looks like a royal screw up on their part. At least I was only trying the free version. Glad I never put any money up for their bad system.
I’m outside the US and they F**KED me over as well.
Never going to touch that ever again, like ever. Mentioned it to a few clients so now I look stupid too.
I’ve go a HP server under my desk, just spent 5 mins chipping of the logo and binning it.
HP = Hopeless Pricks
About the update “Dear HP Upline Service subscriber”.. SIGHHHH…
What is important is to read how HP is promoting this:
“Only global corporations have been able to do so much with their data – until now.”
And remember, HP is not only promoting this for backup, but is encouraging people to locate ALL their data online for “access anywhere”. This outage and email reflect that as usual, as a large company, they don’t take the needs of small users seriously at all. Can you even imagine them being so ill prepared if this was targeted to those “global corporations” they claim it will allow us small businesses to be like?
I tested it, and thank God I stuck with Mozy, who I’ve never experienced a single outage with.
Does MediaTemple use HP hardware, or HP uses MediaTemple for the Upline? Their Grid Server downtime coincided with the Upline’s almost perfectly… Interesting, as MediaTemple claims that the Grid’s recently purchased hardware did not perform as expected and buckled under load. Sad…
Stick with Mozy, kids.
I am sure that HP will bring up the service within a short time, and these are just temporary hiccups. But i think HP should learn from mistakes and make sure these dont happen again.
it seems that’s it will not be available for european anymore… the service was normally dedicated to US market only… it’s a real shame….
I used Upline personaly..backed up around 32 GB data normally…n thank God i didn’t get any error as ppl got in upcomments..even when i am in Pakistan..where they have not launched formally..
Yeah they are down now..but i have trust in HP..so hope for the best…They will be up soon..i wish !!!
Having been a happy owner of HP products in the past, I went with Upline for my business’ online backup needs. Aside from the service being unavailable, I found it to be too limiting.
You can only backup files that have file extensions, and you have to manually add extensions not in the default list. I use various applications that create data files with no extensions (i.e. Subversion). With Upline, you can’t back these up unless you manually add extensions to the files or put them in a zip file.
It seems like it will be good for home users wanting to backup photos, videos, music and documents, but I don’t see it being much better than that….once it is actually up.
I’ll be enjoying my refund and exploring other services.
Not only is their application not quite ready for prime time, make sure you carefully read their T&C’s which are also not ready for prime time. Particularly this: “Any material, information or other communication (”Communications”) you transmit or post to this Site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. HP will have no obligations with respect to the Communications. HP and its designees will be free to copy, disclose, distribute, incorporate and otherwise use the Communications and all data, images, sounds, text, and other things embodied therein for any and all commercial or non-commercial purposes.”
Who in their right mind would sign up for a backup service that gives away ALL of their right associated with THEIR OWN DATA ?????
I’m really stumped as to the lack of QA associated with this service, which is not what I have come to expect from HP.
I actually have had some similar experiences. I noticed that it was very hard to get the software to run very well on my Vista machine. Also, it took me about 2-3 days to upload 6GB of my 44GB that I was looking to sync.
Prior to doing the upload…I found that I had to move ALL of my files from my Linux server onto my Windows Vista hard drive because the software will not allow you to monitor mapped drives that reside on other systems. Their answer was to move all my files and then schedule a local backup to the mapped drive…because the software was capable of doing a local backup to the drive.
Most frustrating is the upload speed. I can attach a 25MB file in Hotmail in about 1.5 minutes….took about 15 minutes with Upline.
Some Einstein inside HP just went on and said: non-american-resident? Screw them. So I’m out, and, I believe, numerous early adopters.
Can someone tell those m@rons that the web goes a little bit further than the US, please?
This service is actually from a US based company that HP just bought and rebranded. Service must not be ready to scale, which is probably why they decided to cut back.
HP, like IBM (and unlike Dell), makes most of it’s sales and revenue outside the US.
I’m not happy with Upline. It rarely runs smoothly, and I had to reinstall twice. Also, it’s not as “user friendly” as I’d expect from a giant like HP.
This upline is the worst. I have never gotten it to work and the tech support hung up on me and said they would call back and didn’t. DON’T USE THIS SERVICE!!!
I’m using Upline from last 3 months, it works…. o dont see any error….its backing up data smoothly… also no problem in getting data back, if i delete it from my disc…. may be service getting better….
alert(’hi’);
..
****Email from HP:****
Thank you for your interest in HP Upline.
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.upl...port/email.aspx.
HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.
Thank you.
HP Upline team
SafeCopy Backup is offering a 10% discount to HP Upline customers. Keep in mind SafeCopy is already 1/3 the cost of the HP Upline Family Plan which is limited to 3 users.
With SafeCopy you can purchase ONE account for ALL your computers. Works on Mac, PC, iPhone, Smartphone. SafeCopy also allows you to easily share files over 1GB.
Promo code of “upline” is good through April 15th.