Lima closes its doors, Personal Cloud devices will soon stop working
Lima, the creator of "Personal Cloud" devices designed to bring private clouds to the mainstream, has announced the startup's closure.
Emailed notifications were sent to Lima users on Tuesday and a message published on the startup's website said that Lima is closing its doors due to funding problems.
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The San Francisco-based company, launched in 2011, raised $1.2 million via crowdfunding back in 2013 for its Personal Cloud device dreams. A further $2.5 million was raised in 2014 through a Series A funding round led by Partech.
Reviewed by ZDNet in 2017, the Lima Ultra was one of the firm's final products. You connect the device to a router and it acts as a centralized storage system which can be accessed from anywhere by users via cloud technology.
As we said at the time, there were limits to the device which hampered its usefulness, but the Lima range certainly did have potential.
It seems, however, that the startup's aspirations were not to be.
See also: Lima Ultra: Tiny, personal cloud storage that just misses the mark
"Despite tremendous efforts from the team to avoid this, we had some funding problems that we couldn't recover from," said Severin Marcombes, CEO of Lima. "As you know, we're a startup -- and that happens in startup life."
Lima says that the company was "forced out," but hopes that "innovation won't stop in this area."
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The startup accounts for over 80,000 users. All of these users need to be aware that their devices will slowly stop working from 1 March 2019.
While the Lima product line operates without storing user data on external servers, these servers are still used to facilitate personal device synchronization.
"Unfortunately, as our services shut down, your Lima will progressively stop to work," Lima says.
If you are a Lima user, you can export your data before time runs out. In order to do so, you have several options:
- Turn on all of your Lima devices and open the Lima app on a Windows or Mac machine to use the export data function.
- If the device is encrypted, you need to use the Lima decryption tool which is only suitable for Windows 8 and 10, or MacOS version 10.10 and above.
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The news of the closure was met with varying degrees of sadness and annoyance. Many users have asked for Lima to open-source the code used on its servers, which would potentially give the users of soon-to-be Lima bricks the option to install the software on their own servers to maintain functionality.
For the average user, however, sadly your device will soon cease to function, and all that can be done is to make sure that your content does not die with your personal cloud.