![]() ![]() ***April 2016 update: Bitcasa has recently scrapped its free account in favour of a 60-day free trial. Premium and Pro subscribers can utilise larger amounts of storage space, as well as having access to file sharing capabilities, enhanced customer support and HD streaming. Price Plansįor those looking to backup a small selection of files, Bitcasa’s Basic plan offers 5GB of storage free of charge. You can read a detailed review below or sign up now. Simple and intuitive to use, it boasts some better-than-average security features and file sharing options, and is a straightforward way to store files online. You can read our IDrive review to find out more about Bitcasa’s recommended alternative, or look into some more options by checking out our lists of the 5 Best Cloud Storage Providers for Windows and Mac, 2016.Īlthough still suffering from the drop in popularity that followed their controversial price hike in 2014, Bitcasa’s software is fundamentally very good. ![]() In anticipation of the closure, they have partnered with IDrive, who are offering discounts (for a limited time only) to any users wishing to transfer their data from Bitcasa Drive. For more information on the closure and how to retrieve your files, you can check out Bitcasa’s Help Center, or contact their Support team directly. The decision has been made so that Bitcasa can focus primarily on their platform business, and will affect all users. Signup for the Bitcasa beta (Opens in a new window).Bitcasa Drive is closing its doors, with all user accounts and data to be removed on May 20th at 11:59 PST. This is definitely a service to keep an eye on it could change the way we store files if it works as advertised. There will also be a freemium version of Bitcasa down the road with limited storage space. During this beta period, the service will be free to use. A limited beta is about to start, and users are free to register their interest, but there are no guarantees on availability. Can Bitcasa scale to meet the file management needs of all users as it gains popularity?īitcasa has apparently demonstrated enough potential to attract $1.3 million in venture funding. This isn’t just another synced folder on a device, users will essentially be doing all their file management on the cloud. The constant encryption and syncing of files to the cloud could be costly in terms of system performance, for instance. ![]() On the surface of it, Bitcasa sounds remarkable, but there are still some important questions to be answered. The upshot being that if two users have an identical file in Bitcasa, the service only keeps one copy and makes it available to both users. Bitcasa uses a de-duplication algorithm along with compression technology to reduce the amount of storage space needed for each user. ![]() Those MP3s purchased from iTunes, photos, and even all those pirated movies are duplicated on many other users’ computers. Gauda explained at Disrupt that roughly 60% of individual user data is duplicated elsewhere. The key is that a user’s data is never completely unique, or even mostly unique. So how can a start-up afford to offer unlimited cloud storage out of the gate for just $10 per month? Dropbox charges that same rate for just 50GB, and they've been building out for a few years. This has the added benefit of making important files available offline. According to Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda, intelligent caching will make the most frequently used content available as local cache. Larger files, like video can just be streamed without downloading. When a user needs to access a file, it is pulled down seamlessly from the Bitcasa cloud storage. All Bitcasa (or angry copyright holders) can see are encrypted bits. Before uploading anything to the cloud, content is encrypted on the local machine, meaning that Bitcasa is not in a position to know what files it is storing. On the server-side, all Bitcasa is concerned with is the 1's and 0's that make up the file. The service won’t be dealing with the actual files from the computer. With all those files automatically written to the cloud, it also becomes trivially easy to share them. Instead, the cloud is the computer’s hard drive, and the physical local disk is used like cache. The idea is that Bitcasa will become completely integrated with the device, negating the idea of placing certain files in the cloud. This company announced a cloud storage solution that offers unlimited space for $10 per month.īitcasa is aiming to provide more than just a synced folder on a computer. At this year’s Disrupt conference, a start-up called Bitcasa is doing something different with cloud storage. Services like Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive, and Amazon S3 give users a set amount of online storage, and we have become comfortable with the notion of hard drives in the cloud. Cloud storage is nothing new in this age of high-speed internet connections. ![]()
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