HP has recently announced plans to shut down their cloud-based storage service. The service, Upline, which was originally launched last April will soon be closing down. The stated reason for termination was that “HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service,” which I would imagine somehow means that it was not proving worthwhile in terms of money.

The Upline service will officially close on March 31, however current customers will see their backups stopping as of February 26. Those backup files will then remain online and available till the end of March. After the March 31 deadline, customers will no longer have access to any files that are remaining in their Upline accounts. Bottom line, if you are a current customer, make sure you get your files quickly, before you lose them.

As for any current paying customers, according to HP, you can expect a refund for the “full amount of the fees you paid for the service.” Those refunds will be returned by your original payment method, and you should see that money before March 31, 2009.

HP has been a little up and down with their recently announced Upline service. After being announced on April 7, the service seemed promising, but was quickly taken off-line on April 18 with little explanation as to why it was going down or even for how long it would be gone.

The good news is that the Upline service is now back online. According to HP the service will pretty much pick up where it left off and everything will restart automatically. Meaning any backups that you had setup will begin to run at their scheduled time, as well as any files that you have backed up or stored in your account will be just where you left them.

All things considered its hard too complain that much, after all they are giving new users the option to get a basic 1-user Home plan for free for the first year, but at the same time it is a little worry some that it could disappear again.

Keep reading for the full email from HP regarding the return of the Upline service…

HP has taken their recently announced Upline service offline. An email from HP revealed the bad news that they have “suspended operation” and unfortunately gave no details as to when the service will return, other than a mention that they anticipate the downtime to be “temporary and short in duration” with a promise of email notification when it does return.

An attempt to login simply offers a message stating:

“The HP Upline Service is temporarily unavailable.”

To take the outage a little further it seems the service was initially intended for users in the US only, however the online signup initially allowed anyone to register. Sadly it looks like those located outside the US will not be regaining their access, at least not anytime soon.

After hearing about the Upline service I was initially excited and signed up almost immediately, in part because the service was free to try and use for a year, but also because I thought it would be a reliable service considering it was from a big name company. Sadly this just goes to show that you can never be too careful with your data, thankfully I have not uploaded any items that I cannot live without. Keep reading for the full bad news email from HP…

With more and more people working on the go and from multiple computers, in-the-cloud storage options are becoming more and more common to see. The latest is the Upline and it comes courtesy of HP. Upline is set up nicely for individual consumers and small business customers alike and offers file sharing, remote access, file publishing, local archiving, data migration and a dashboard set up for multiple users.

Users can access or upload files via a web interface that seems to work on any Internet connected computer (I tested it using Firefox 3 beta 5 on a Mac) or using the Upline program which can be downloaded to any computer running Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

Perhaps the best news of all is that with the recent introduction, HP is (for a limited time) offering new users one-year of access for free. Aside from the free trial, HP also offers a 1-user Home plan for $4.99 a month, a 3-user Family plan for $6.99 a month and a 3-100 user Professional plan for $8.99 a month.