HP’s Upline: Affordable Unlimited Online Storage

Lately there have been all kinds of file storing and sharing services popping up. It was just several weeks ago that we wrote about Dropbox, and gave out 50 invites to readers (with many more still trying to get an invite) so that they too could checkout the service. Now yesterday, HP announced that they were getting into the online storage arena by launching a new service called Upline.  In our opinion, this is probably one of the more significant happenings in online storage because a big name like HP is backing it and will surely use their resources to promote it. Another reason it is significant is because while they charge a small fee per month, all subscribers are given unlimited storage.

When I say a small fee, it really is reasonable. Their plans are all unlimited, it just depends on how many users you want to be able to access and use the service.

• Home Plan – available to 1 user for $4.99 per month
• Family Plan – available to 3 users for $6.99 per month
• Professional Plan – available to 3-100 users for $8.99 per month

Because it’s unlimited, you can upload all you’d like whether it be documents or photos to share with friends and family. The other feature that is enticing is that because it’s online storage, users will have access to all of their files no matter where they are, as long as they have an Internet connection. It appears as though they’re not too concerned about bandwidth limitations because nowhere on their site could we find any information on it.

Features include:

• automatic backup
• 1-click restore
• access from anywhere
• share with friends
• management dashboard (Professional users only)
• priority support (Professional users only)

In the past we’ve seen services like DivShare come in and offer unlimited storage for free and then we’ve seen them scale back because it was too much to handle. We can’t see HP yanking away the unlimited storage from users for a couple of reasons. First of all, they are charging users for the service. Granted, it’s not a lot of money that they’re charging, but users are still paying. Secondly, HP is a big company and they’ve been around for a while. At the end of the day, they’ve got the resources needed to keep Upline going.

While reading the FAQ, I noticed a few interesting facts. The first is that if you have about 5GB of files you want backed-up, it will take almost a whole day to complete it.  They say that they backup at about 150-250 MB per hour so that one GB takes about 4-5 hours to complete. Another interesting fact is that if you make a small change to a file, Upline will only backup the changes that have been made and they call this differential backup.

Overall, we’d say that this is a rather promising backup and file sharing storage solution.  If you’d like to get started, just go here and you’ll see the different plans with the option to “Buy Now.”

Source: TechCrunch