HP Enters With Unlimited Backup

As the battle continues against the ultimate online backup solutions, HP has stepped forth with its service called HP Upline. It is a decent backup product at a good price point, but it has a few frustrating limitations.

The software is simple to get started with and the paid plans provide unlimited storage for your documents, photos, music, and video files. The system checks for new files by default every 15 minutes, and uploads your data to the HP servers in a quiet background process. There is a free version that gives you 1GB of online storage for a year, but if you are serious about backup (like me); you will want one of the paid versions. The least expensive “Home plan” ($59.00/year) gives you the unlimited storage and allows up to three PCs. Family plans and small office plans give you individual storage bins, and the business plans also give you an administrator’s dashboard.

Something I really like is that the product allows for web-based access to your backed-up files, which is very useful if you want a file and not by your computer. You can also share files via e-mail or the publish files for public access. Upline can also back up files to a local device, such as a second hard drive, a server, or a PC on the local network. This is a cool feature and I do not think there is a service out that that does both, local and remote storage options, but I could be wrong.

Now there are some cons to this service. Firstly, if you want to back up your emails, you will not be able to. Not yet, anyway. Secondly, this service is focusing on backing up only and not restoring your system, so if you happen to crash your hard drive, you cannot use Upline to restore the system. Although I think this is a feature that is likely to come in the future. Thirdly, the application does not offer PC-to-PC sync. I feel this is a very important feature, and I would suggest looking at a few of my favorites, FolderShare, BeInSync, and SugarSync.

Lastly, HP Upline is not compatible with Mac. I think it is important to offer for both platforms, especially today, since there seems to be a mixed variety of Mac and PC users. Regardless, HP Upline is a great, promising service and in the onward battle of backup solutions, it is also important to keep a nice price point and at $59/year for unlimited backup, I think they have secured themselves in the battle.