Upthere

» see upthere.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Bertrand Serlet ran software engineering at Apple for a decade and shipped Mac OS X up through Snow Leopard. He left in 2011, started Upthere with Roger Bodamer and Alex Kushnir, and then the company said almost nothing in public for four years. What it was building was storage with no sync: your photos went straight into the Upthere cloud, and the copy on your laptop was the cache rather than the original. In that design the file system was the thing to get rid of.

Upthere came out of stealth on 29 October 2015 with two apps, Upthere Home and Upthere Camera, behind a closed beta. The real launch was 27 July 2016, when it dropped the beta label and published prices: $4.99 a month for 200 GB, $1.99 for each additional 100 GB, three months free with no card required. The same day it announced a $77 million round with Google Ventures and Western Digital among the names on it. Reviewers were warm. Macworld's hands-on kept reaching for the phrase "sync-free" because there was no shorter way to say what the thing actually did.

Western Digital bought the company outright on 28 August 2017. For a storage startup that is normally the good ending, since the acquirer makes the drives underneath. It ran for two more years. On 4 September 2019 Western Digital announced it was withdrawing Upthere and SanDisk Cloud both, citing falling usage and mobile apps that had been left to go stale.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Every consumer cloud of that era was a mirror of a folder you already had. Dropbox watched a directory. iCloud watched a directory. Upthere's argument was that the directory itself was a leftover from when disks were small and expensive, and that if storage was effectively infinite the right primitive was the object, not the path. Uploads were content-addressed, so the same photo sent twice cost nothing the second time. There were no folders to maintain, only automatic buckets by type and a thing called a Loop for the cases where you insisted on sorting by hand.

It is a good idea, and it asks for the one thing no storage company gets to ask for twice. To benefit from it you have to stop keeping the master copy yourself. Everyone who tried Upthere understood the pitch in about ninety seconds and then had to decide whether a four-year-old company in Palo Alto was where their wedding photos should live.

~ the disk company years ~

Western Digital had already been an investor before it was an owner, and the acquisition read at the time as a hardware company buying its way into recurring revenue. The service kept running under its own brand, sitting on the WD site next to SanDisk Cloud and the G-Technology line, with all three logos in the footer of upthere.com. Nothing new shipped. The apps aged in place, which is the detail Western Digital's own closure notice ended up using as a reason.

~ the day the files went ~

From early September 2019 the homepage carried its own death notice above the marketing copy: "Upthere Home service will be ending on March 3, 2020. If you're a premium subscriber, please sign in and cancel your subscription. You can continue to use the service until March 2, 2020." Six months of warning, a download window, and then on 3 March 2020 all content attached to an Upthere or SanDisk Cloud account was removed from Western Digital's systems.

By the time Upthere was taking money for storage I had been paying nothing for Drive and Dropbox for years, on a TTNet line in Ankara, and the answer to "where do the photos go" was already settled by inertia. That is the hard part of what Serlet was selling. He was not competing with a better product, he was competing with a decision people had already made and had no reason to revisit. The company that eventually owned him sold hard drives, which is the other answer to the same question.

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