The infinite plan on top of that offers an unlimited number of file version changes to be stored on the servers, and chat & email support. For $99 a year (currently discounted at $69, also available for $10 per month) users get unlimited storage. What may make Bitcasa interesting to some though is the only paid plan the company is offering. All users who sign up for Bitcasa can join the free plan which provides them with 10 Gigabyte of online storage space. While that is less than Mega's 50 Gigabyte of storage for free accounts, it is still more than comparable services such as Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive are offering to free users of their service. Copying simply copies the current files and folders to the online storage, while mirroring will keep an eye on the folder to sync any changes made to it to the cloud.īitcasa recently came out of beta introducing two plans to users of the service. On Windows, users can simply right-click a folder and select to copy it to Bitcasa or mirror it instead. A Linux alpha client seems to be available as well.Īll folders on a desktop computer can be synced with Bitcasa which means that it is not limited to a root folder for that. Clients are available for Windows and Mac systems, as well as iOS, Android and Windows Phone. But using it as my primary hard drive and turning my notebook into…well…a netbook. I’m just not there yet, but that’s just me.Bitcasa, unlike Mega, is offering its users a complete package that consists of a website compatible with all recent web browsers and clients for various operating systems to access data on those systems and synchronize files between them. I love the concept and am a believer in the cloud, and what Bitcasa is doing. The benefits vastly outweigh the “sense of ownership” argument, and you can’t beat the price at $10.00 per month. Will consumers be okay with this aggregation of content? Again, for some, no problem. 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.” I wonder how this will fly with a consumer market that prides itself on personal collections. There still remains an element of ownership when it comes to digital assets and content. Bitcasa uses a de-duplication algorithm along with compression technology to reduce the amount of storage space needed for each user. ExtremeTech explained it well, “ Those MP3s purchased from iTunes, photos, and even all those pirated movies are duplicated on many other users’ computers. How do consumers feel about their content being just like everybody else’s? Bitcasa says that most of our content is a duplicate, meaning the likelihood that any piece of content is unique to an individual is small. Hopefully with Bitcasa’s intelligent caching, this is no longer the case. If you make the cloud your hard drive, what will that do to your data usage, and thus your monthly cell bill? As far as I can remember, storage has always been cast as the bottleneck when it comes to raw performance, but with the introduction of the cloud, is the new more pervasive bottleneck going to be network bandwidth? All I know is that opening files stored on the cloud for me is significantly slower than if they were stored locally on my PC. Are they ready to place that trust entirely on the cloud? I think some are, but a majority of mainstream users, probably not quite yet.ĭo customers trust network connectivity/bandwidth enough to rely solely on the cloud for all of their content? Face it, bandwidth is already stretched to its limit as carriers begin to tier data plans to usage. Plus, consumers have the peace of mind that their stuff is on their drives, in their home. There still is no faster more efficient means of storing and retrieving data than local storage. I think people realize that all mechanical devices are prone to fail from time to time, so its incumbent upon the user to protect themselves from such events with backup. The story is compelling for sure, but not without some skepticism…ĭo consumers trust the cloud to be their hard drive? It’s funny how the cloud storage guys always use the risk of hard drive failure as a key selling point, when in all actuality, their business runs almost entirely on hard drives.
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