HP Upline - The solution to the digital archiving problem?

T

Tuolumne

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I was pleased to see the announcement from HP about a month ago of a new service called HP Upline (www.upline.com). For $100 per year (3 years paid upfront) HP will provide an online service to backup an unlimited amount of data from your PC. This seemed like the answer to the prayer of digital photographers, or indeed anyone who makes digital copies of their photographs.

If you've been around these parts for a while you will remember the many acrimonious debates about whether digital was a safe long term storage mechanism, if it had better or worse archival properties than film, etc, etc. HP's service seems like it goes a long way toward making digital storage safely archival at an affordable cost.

I've been using it for about 4 days and it seems to work as claimed, except it is slow, perhaps a function of my upload speed, whatever that is (probably 300 kbps but maybe slower). In 4 days I have transparently archived 8 GB of data. At this rate it will do about 15 GB per week. I have almost 600 GB of data to back up, so this won't be fast, but eventually it will al get up there and be retrievable in case of a disaster. $100 per year seems a reasonable amount to pay for such a service.

The user interface is highly intuitive, and you can also access all of your files from a Web browser and share them across your multiple computers, should you so desire. The $100/year license level includes 3 machines, so you can share this as a family service or use it for a small business. You can also buy additional licenses. As well you can publish or share your data/photos with the world. But I haven't looked into all of these details yet.

The main draw back is that backups are slow, perhaps as a function of upload speed. However, if you are looking for a way to safely archive your photos off site on secure enterprise storage, this seems like the best bet around for now.

/T
 
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It is archival storage. As for the site going away without your knowing it - unlikely: 1) It's HP, which I think is a big deal; 2) you use it almost daily since it is constantly uploading photos, etc. Although it runs in the background it's something you pay attention to once it's on your desktop. 3) Although it is an act of faith, I believe HP knows alot more about the long term storage of data than I ever will.

The biggest unknown issue to me is that HP may raise prices to a level that you find prohibitive. But by then you will be able to buy a 10 TB drive for $500 and you can copy everything to it in about 5 hours, put it in a bank vault, and cancel your Upline account. Which is also probably why the prices will pretty much stay where they are for a long time, if not forever. Truth be told they should drop over time, but they probably won't.

This may not be the only backup you want to keep but it solves alot of problems. Really, the biggest problem I see is that backup is so slow that you may never catch up with the amount of new data you add to your computer. And, if it takes a year to back up everything already there, that's a year when you only have partial protection.

/T
 
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Not archival, but off-site backup.

Not archival, but off-site backup.

It may not be archival in the sense of it will always be there. But it definitely a good solution for the readily available off-site backup.
Currently, my off-site backup is a external drive at friend's house. This works, however, the data is not near-line. I have to physically go get the drive and plug it in. Services like Amazon's and HP's provide the near-line solution. It does cost you $8.33 a month.

As for the "how safe is it?" argument. I would imagine that HP and others have thought about what could happen and have made provisions for it. I don't think that HP is storing the data on their employee's desktops. It's on a NAS of some sort... They have RAID, snapshots, probably even mirrors in different locations and maybe (big maybe.) even backup to tape.

Also, you have to stop at some point in regards to backup and archiving data. I currently have three copies on home NAS devices, and another two sets of copies on individual drives. How many levels of redundancy do you need?

As with a lot of technologies, they eventually trickle down to the people. This is more than likely a case of that. The systems and methodology is set and they are just looking for another revenue stream. I'm not ready to spend $8.33 a month, but if I did, I would go with a big player. HP will around a long time.
 
ampguy said:
Sounds like a cool service, here is more info.:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/04/07/hp-offers-unlimited-online-storage-with-upline/

I wonder how it the image rendering and sharing works. Any ideas on how it compares with flickr pro or smugmug?
Click to expand...

Ampguy,
The purpose of Upline and the other sites is quite different, so they work differently. With the photo sharing sites, you have to explicitly name or drag a file to be uploaded. Once it is uploaded, it can only be retrieved with some difficulty and usually only downloaded one by one. with Upline, you designate folders that are to be watched. Everything in that folder is automatically backed up. If anything is added to a folder or if a file in that folder changes, it is automatically backed up. You indicate the period of time of how often you want a backup done and how often you want the software to check for changes. Once it is backed up the desktop software indicates whether a file that it is backed is still on your computer (it tracks when you rename or move files). If that file is missing, you see it named in a panel and can click restore to bring it back.

So, lets say in the worse case, your computer catches fire and you replace it with a completely new one. When you reconnect to the Upline service it will indicate that all of the files you have backed up are missing. With one click on "restore" they will be brought back down to your new computer.

Pretty slick, assuming of course that those 20 year old refurb Winchester drives they get from Roger and Nikonwebhostmaster don't have so many parity errors and head crashes on them that the data gets stuck! 🙄

/T
P.S. Oh yes, apropos the other part of your question, I haven't tried file sharing yet, so I don't know how it compares with Flickr et al. I would assume that it is pretty basic, since the intent is data availability and not the special needs of photo sharers.
 
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Tuolumne said:
What a silly-ass bunch of goofballs live here.

/T
Click to expand...

This is about the level of most of your arguments: anyone who doesn't agree with you is an idiot, and probably senile as well.

My digital images are backed up on 500 gig external hard drives (note plural), so your comments about 20-year-old winchesters are (as so often) complete nonsense as well as gratuitously insulting.

At least learn to be civil. We don't call you, personally, ignorant and inexperienced, though sometimes you assume that comments (such as mine about juvenile fantasies and Chinese Leicas) are specifically targeted at you. Well, if the cap fits, wear it, but if I make a general comment (again, such as the above) I certainly don't aim it specifically at you. Why would I bother? Your views just aren't that important to me (or, I suspect, to many others).
 
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NWM,
I figured that you would bring up web hosting as a argument of not trusting anyone. ...and it's a very valid argument. I too know about the fiasco that is web hosting.

We should never trust anyone or any company 100%. However, there are levels of trust. Do I trust HP blindly, 100% to keep my data forever, have no glitches? NO. but... I surely would trust HP more that a local start-up trying to get into the online storage market. Is using a online storage provider better than having ALL your copies in house with no off-site backup? Cost not being prohibited, of course it is. At $8.33 a month, it's currently not worth it to me, Under $5 a month, I would think about it hard.

It's all about how many levels of protection you want to have. Backup systems is like life insurance. Very nice to have, but you hope you never has to use them.
 
jfretless said:
Do I trust HP blindly, 100% to keep my data forever, have no glitches? NO. but... I surely would trust HP more that a local start-up trying to get into the online storage market. Is using a online storage provider better than having ALL your copies in house with no off-site backup? Cost not being prohibited, of course it is. . .
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone's arguing that it's worthless: merely that it's not the only form of backup that you need, and that you have to stop somewhere (as you have).

The other point is that there's a difference between archiving and backup.

Cheers,

R.
 
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Roger Hicks said:
This is about the level of most of your arguments: anyone who doesn't agree with you is an idiot, and probably senile as well.

My digital images are backed up on 500 gig external hard drives (note plural), so your comments about 20-year-old winchesters are (as so often) complete nonsense as well as gratuitously insulting.

At least learn to be civil. We don't call you, personally, ignorant and inexperienced, though sometimes you assume that comments (such as mine about juvenile fantasies and Chinese Leicas) are specifically targeted at you. Well, if the cap fits, wear it, but if I make a general comment (again, such as the above) I certainly don't aim it specifically at you. Why would I bother? Your views just aren't that important to me (or, I suspect, to many others).
Click to expand...

Roger,
Just one of your many failings is a total lack of a sense of humor. And the ability to laugh at yourself just a little.

/T
 
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