HP’s Upline: Good Idea, HORRIBLY Executed
April 16th, 2008
A few days ago, on one of my favorite sites, TechCrunch, I discovered Hewlett-Packard’s new Upline online storage service. I’m a big HP fan, and Upline’s unlimited online storage for just $59 a year sounded like a flatout amazing deal—especially since hard-drive crashes in the past several years have cost me well over $3000 to retrieve vital data from the failed disks. I immediately signed up for the Upline “Home” plan for $59/year, created an Upline account, and downloaded the Upline client. Wooyeah! I was ready to upload everything from my entire mp3 collection to all my documents, every musical track I’ve ever written, and even my vast sample library…to a place where it would remain safe even if the Magneto were to bust into my house and destroy all of my external backup drives with one gigantic kilogauss “Fuck you!”
Yeah, well, that’s when the trouble started.
At the time, I was running Windows Vista Home Premium on my home computer, the HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania Mainframe (an HP m7580n). Installing the Upline client went smoothly, but after the client had been running for a few minutes, scanning over the folder that I had selected for backup, the client just…vanished. I’d gone to the ‘fridge for a drink and when I came back, it was just gone. We’re talking Natalee Holloway Gone here: no traces, no crash warnings, nothing. Puzzled, I restarted it, and it again needed to go through its initial account set-up procedure (none of that info had apparently been saved the first time), then once more started scanning for files to upload. This time, it got as far as beginning to upload the files. After only 1gb of data had gone “up” the “line”, the client again…*POOF*. This time I witnessed it with my own shocked widdle eyes: both client windows, the large detailed one and the little “basic” one that appeared above the system tray just disappeared.
This time, thinking some kind of serious shit was happening, I consulted my computer’s event logs. Both Application and System logs showed no crash alerts or even informational entries related to the Upline client. It simply would not stay active for very long. And when it decided it was finally time to catch a bus to Reno, it slipped away from my desktop as quietly as a cat in the night, leaving no traces of any ill activity behind.
I immediately reported this via email to HP who, after a few bounces back and forth providing outputs of my System/Application logs and some other technical info, responded that
There is no known issues with upline application with VISTA home premium 32 bit. You could either try clean boot to troubleshoot the issue .
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135Also if you have different computer you could try on that and see whether upline application is shutting down.
Now, I have been having more and more strange problems with Windows Vista over the past few weeks than I’ve ever had before, so I figured this was just yet another Vista problem. (My frustration with Windows Vista had been growing since October, and SP1 had actually made many of the problems, mostly of an audio nature, worse than they’d ever been—but I’ll post about that later.) I decided that the camel’s back had finally broken. My patience had finally worn out. It was finally time to “upgrade” back to Windows XP, which I did today. I restored the original XP installation to my computer and, after cleaning out the usual crapware, installing a few hundred updates, and just generally tinkering around with various settings to make sure everything was the way I liked it, had a nice, clean, perfectly stable Windows XP environment running.
After copying my personal data (y’know, all the stories I’ve written, Cthulhu pr0n I’ve downloaded, and illegal XviD rips of Andy Griffith) into XP’s “My Documents” from their temporary exile on one of my external drives, I decided it was time to set up and configure Upline once more—hopefully without any goddamned, weird-ass Vista craziness.
Instead, guess what? I experienced even stranger problems. Twilight Zone problems, people. Seriously. Witness:
To begin with, the installation crashed twice. Never a good sign. I finally got the client to install, however, and entered my account information and selected folders to back up once again. The familiar two Upline windows appeared and the client began scanning the files in the selected folders, just like before. It was chugging along just fine when—wait for it—my monitor went black. Black as the depths of the interdimensional portal at the heart of the Event Horizon. The computer was still running, and the hard-drive was still grinding as if it were being indexed, but…the monitor was in power-down mode. It’s power light had turned orange and NO DVI INPUT was flashing on the screen. Now let me tell you…I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. Not even when I had a video card go bad. All that happened that time was the screen resolution went wonky. It didn’t turn into a gateway to the Chaos Dimension.
So I pulled the plug on my computer and restarted it. Once it restarted, the Upline client launched automatically at start-up and—you guessed it—I had to input all the login information, select folders, yadda yadda yadda. I was thoroughly sick of the damn thing by this point, but “Hey,” curiosity said to me, “Lessee how it fucks up this time!” Well, this time the screen didn’t blank out, and the client finished scanning, but when I clicked the Backup button the client froze. Froze up like you’d just thrown its processor thread into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
To cut a long story short, I attempted to get the client to work precisely six more times. Four of those times, it froze the second I clicked Backup (and could not be shutdown by any means short of killing the process in the Task Manager [interesting sidenote: the client was using upwards of 300MB of memory each time the process had to be killed]). Twice more, it made my monitor/video-card/what-the-hell-ever completely shut down and blackness, the vile blackness of complete unknowing, prevailed once more.
Needless to say, I called to cancel the service and demand a refund. Prior to this, my experience with HP products and services has been top-notch: I’ve never had any trouble with my desktop or my laptop (both HPs), nor with my printer/scanner, nor with any of the software or drivers I’ve ever gotten from HP. Anytime I’ve ever contacted HP Customer Service, they were incredibly helpful, too—and they were this time, as well: the lady whom I spoke to on the phone took down all of the information needed to refund my payment via PayPal and even provided me with a case number to consult to ensure my refund is received. HP Customer Service is excellent. Too bad their Upline client, however, is a total piece of shit.
To sum it all up…HP’s Upline sounds like it could be a really amazing service. Only $60 a year to back up literally all your data? That’s serious value there, folks. But not if the software client you need to get your data up that Upline can’t even stay afloat long enough to tally up a single folder’s worth of Microsoft Word documents. Pathetic.
HP, if someone one of your tech people gets wind of this blog entry, listen up: I will gladly repurchase an Upline Home Account again if you can prove to me that your client isn’t some half-assed hunk of schizophrenic code anymore. If you get the goddamn thing to work—and by work I don’t mean “work every now and then” but work as well as the drivers to my Photosmart C6280 All-in-One printer/scanner/toaster thingee do—then I’ll gladly hop back on board.
Because right now, I can’t afford to buy 500gb external hard-drive to backup still more data onto. I’ve run out of USB ports! I have a USB hub plugged in to another USB hub and I still don’t have enough damn ports….If USB ports were dollar bills I’d be a…a…well, I’d have enough money to buy another USB hub at Staples.
Add New Comment
Viewing 7 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I can't even contact their tech support. The tech support website for UpLine is not working. I was able to backup 1 GB on 2 machines but I kept getting a "Space Exceeded" window and UpLine would not backup anymore.
I agree. . . Great idea and value but not ready for prim time.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Good luck with that, and please post any further weirdness. It seems to me as though no one has had a seamless experience with this service, and the problems always come from the Upline software itself. It's even worse than the Zune 1.0 software!
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Thanks for getting the word out on this.
I am sure they will take action soon after others become aware of this. This just cannot be a correct Term/Condition for a secure backup site. I'm thinking it must be a hold-over from some other web service that they are offering and it didnt get the careful review it needed.
This is an awesome concept, so hopefully they will get the execution right. I have TONS of personal photos and video clips that are screaming out for a service like this.
Jim
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
That is quite alarming. I read over the T&Cs; before I even considered signing up for the service and at the time that I read them there was no such mention of that particular clause in the document. Now, it's certainly possible that I could've overlooked it--my brain tends to be lulled into a trancelike state by legalese--but I'm fairly certain that I would've noticed a clause like that immediately.
It's also possible that they've revised their Terms & Conditions since I signed up (and subsequently closed the account). It seems nonsensical, though, to include wording like that in reference to a "secure" backup service, even one that gives users the ability to share backed-up materials. This is reminiscent, though, of the recent T&C; controversy concerning Adobe's online version of Photoshop, which contained terms rather similar that explicitly allowed Adobe the right to use any and all images processed by the service for their own use. Adobe was smart, though, and subsequently revised their docs after the blogosphere tore into them like a pack of furious hounds.
Perhaps HP will do the same. I will make sure that this "gets out" and the right people are allerted.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
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.
Add New Comment