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.
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