Online Storage Vendors Drop Off

By Tom Dunlap

A couple years ago, my hard drive crashed. When I got back up and running, I thought I'd try one of those online storage and backup services.

Well, I was sorely disappointed with the experience. It was not fun and easy to use. I never knew what the service was backing up, or when. I couldn't follow the little messages that popped up with updates. After months of not using the service, I quit. Now I just back up stuff to a portable hard drive.

At the time, I thought that online storage technology has just got to be easier to use. And today I see that I'm getting some agreement on that. As my colleague Paul Shread wrote today:

The much-hyped market for online data storage appears to be winnowing, and a few high-profile names are among the casualties.

HP and Yahoo have notified users that they will be shutting down their online data backup services at the end of the month, following the closure of AOL's XDrive service in January.

Yahoo's free Briefcase service was bypassed by users who preferred the greater storage capacity of its e-mail and Flickr offerings, while the XDrive Web site now directs users to offerings from Box.net and ElephantDrive.

HP's Upline service got off to a rocky start last year, suffering an outage soon after it launched in a blow for one of the cloud storage market's higher-profile entries. HP is no longer backing up customer files, but will allow customers to access files through the restore feature through the end of the month.

And all this before Google's long-awaited GDrive service even arrives.

Shread interviewed Taneja Group analyst Jeff Boles, a man after my own heart when it comes to actually using these services, on the consumer level.
 
Storage vendors, Boles said, "keep taking a run at this hosted storage thing with very little innovation in how we are trying to do it. Moreover, at the consumer level, some of these services remain pretty hard to use, try to tackle too much, or represent a partial set of functionality."

Maybe Google will offer some compelling innovation with the GDrive online storage service, but I remain skeptical.