Cloud startup founded by former Apple executives acquired by Western Digital
Western Digital on Monday announced the acquisition of Upthere, an app-based cloud services startup founded by a three-man team including former Apple SVP of Mac Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet.
The asset acquisition follows a successful $77 million venture capital funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year. Western Digital declined to disclose the purchase price in an announcement on Monday.
Designed as a platform agnostic cloud storage solution, Upthere provides users direct access to their files, videos, documents and other media without moving relying on locally stored assets. While the system looks and acts like products marketed by competitors Dropbox and Box, all file actions are accomplished in the cloud.
AppleInsider took a hands-on look at the Upthere app last year and came away impressed by the system's flexibility and ease of use.
"Upthere is delivering on its mission to transform the personal storage market, and we share their focus on providing consumers more rich and meaningful experiences with their data," said Jim Welsh, SVP and general manager of Client Solutions at Western Digital. "I'm pleased to have Upthere CEO Chris Bourdon join the team as a strategic leader. His extensive software expertise will help accelerate our user experience and cloud services imperatives across all aspects of the Client Solutions business."
Bourdon is also a former Apple employee, having served as a senior product line manager for Mac OS X from 1997 to 2012, when Upthere was founded.
Along with Serlet and technology industry veteran Alex Kushnir, Upthere counts former Apple VP Roger Bodamer as a founding member. Bodamer, who previously worked for Oracle and a string of Silicon Valley firms, initially acted as the firm's CEO until 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Serlet left Apple in 2011 after overseeing major OS X version launches since 10.6 Snow Leopard and initiating the project that would become iOS. He currently sits as director of Upthere's board.
Upthere will fall under the purview of new Western Digital Cloud Services boss Barbara Nelson, who recently joined the company after working at cloud security firm IronKey as an executive vice president and general manager.
The asset acquisition follows a successful $77 million venture capital funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year. Western Digital declined to disclose the purchase price in an announcement on Monday.
Designed as a platform agnostic cloud storage solution, Upthere provides users direct access to their files, videos, documents and other media without moving relying on locally stored assets. While the system looks and acts like products marketed by competitors Dropbox and Box, all file actions are accomplished in the cloud.
AppleInsider took a hands-on look at the Upthere app last year and came away impressed by the system's flexibility and ease of use.
"Upthere is delivering on its mission to transform the personal storage market, and we share their focus on providing consumers more rich and meaningful experiences with their data," said Jim Welsh, SVP and general manager of Client Solutions at Western Digital. "I'm pleased to have Upthere CEO Chris Bourdon join the team as a strategic leader. His extensive software expertise will help accelerate our user experience and cloud services imperatives across all aspects of the Client Solutions business."
Bourdon is also a former Apple employee, having served as a senior product line manager for Mac OS X from 1997 to 2012, when Upthere was founded.
Along with Serlet and technology industry veteran Alex Kushnir, Upthere counts former Apple VP Roger Bodamer as a founding member. Bodamer, who previously worked for Oracle and a string of Silicon Valley firms, initially acted as the firm's CEO until 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Serlet left Apple in 2011 after overseeing major OS X version launches since 10.6 Snow Leopard and initiating the project that would become iOS. He currently sits as director of Upthere's board.
Upthere will fall under the purview of new Western Digital Cloud Services boss Barbara Nelson, who recently joined the company after working at cloud security firm IronKey as an executive vice president and general manager.
Comments
Maybe his plan was to be acquired early, right from the beginning of the project.
I second the thought that it would be great for Serlet to come back to Apple.
Yeah..I know...i'm fickle.
https://blog.cloudrail.com/cloud-storage-report-2017/
Sync means having a file present on the drive and in the cloud and when it's removed from the drive, it's also removed from the cloud. A lot of the time people want backups that are like external hard drives where changes don't get synced to the backup and it allows freeing up internal storage. It's similar to mirrored display vs extended display.
The popular services have started to offer something called selective sync but it's not very intuitive to setup:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/selective-sync-overview
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3057217/google-apps/how-to-use-google-drives-selective-sync.html
UpThere doesn't use synced backups by default:
http://www.macworld.com/article/3007894/data-center-cloud/upthere-hands-on-promising-sync-free-cloud-storage-for-mac-iphone.html
"On the Mac, there’s no central folder for syncing files like iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, and desktop content can’t be mirrored like SugarSync or Bitcasa either. This is by design: Upthere was designed as a central cloud repository for all of your files."
Amazon Drive allows you to do this kind of backup too ( https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive ).
The way I'd prefer cloud backups worked is not using a sync folder or just a manual upload but instead tagging files. Just right-click a file/folder and choose to keep it backed up. This would record the inode and path in case it moved. Backups wouldn't be removed on deleting the file, they'd just be marked as standalone backups online. Backups would also not be done sequentially but in blocks the way that macOS encrypts data and compressed for faster cloud backups. This way you don't have to think about large backups failing or resuming in the background when the computer goes into standby and it means that it can do checksums on blocks to see if portions of files (e.g header or metadata) have changed and sync just the changed blocks.
On top of this, the blocks can optionally be encrypted as separate files using private keys. This is the whole problem celebrities keep having with getting pictures hacked from the cloud, which is they are only protected by the logins, some personal content should be more strongly encrypted than this and the private keys should be stored securely on the devices. 3rd party apps can do this by encrypting the keys behind a passcode or fingerprint. To get hacked, it would require both hacking or phishing the service and stealing the private key on the device. This does prevent being able to access media on the cloud without downloading and it means it's inaccessible if the keys are gone but that's the only way it's secure and the cloud service can have a feature to separately backup the encrypted private keys to offline hosting in case devices are stolen or keys are lost.
I think most users would get on better with the equivalent of a hard drive in the cloud rather than all the sync rules the main services have. It would just mount like a hard drive and you drop things into it via SFTP or some custom protocol and any software can be used for synced backups into different folders. Families could have shared backups and each device would be protected in their own folders but there could be shared folders for music, movies, family photos, calendars and public links for sharing online or to people outside the storage account. Each public link can be time-limited, download-limited, single URL, mapped to a domain etc.
iCloud Drive does the sync thing too where if you drop files into it, it keeps them synced with the desktop and if you remove it, the backup goes too. They have optimized storage in macOS but that just removes some local files automatically. The more media that people have and the more that people are using small SSDs, the more people could use an external drive in the cloud, especially one that can sync documents intuitively. It would be nice to be able to link files on different devices and filesystems with different paths and inodes. When they have changed, the sync doesn't have to overwrite automatically between devices, it can show a notification like a dot over the file icon saying it's been synced with a new version and if you open it and find it's not right, you can go back to the last version.
The shared versioning system can be used in businesses for documents. It should be trivial to add new employees into cloud services and have data synced to their personal devices and be able to revoke it just as easily.