5/9/2023 0 Comments Bitcasa acquisition![]() What’s most interesting about Bitcasa is that, as the name implies, the technology deals in the individual bits underlying a file (the 0’s and 1’s) and doesn’t know or care about the files themselves. The company is currently a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Bitcasa provides limitless cloud storage for only $10 per month and has received $1.3 million in investment from such heavyweights as Andreeson Horowitz, First Round Capital and Pelion Venture Partners. It also improves security, as data no longer has to be sent back to the US, cutting down the risk that it could be intercepted en route.If you haven’t yet heard of Bitcasa, you probably soon will. This will improve performance but, also, offer better protection on data privacy. So, European users will now be accessing a European data centre. All the same, this is an impressive debut for a new cloud storage service, with plenty of potential to improve.īitcasa has now announced that customers will now have data stored in their own regions. If, however, you need a solution to synchronise files across multiple PCs, or a service that enables collaboration between teams or people working on a project, then the other services are better bets. Where it falls short is collaborative features – you can’t share and sync folders as you can in Dropbox – and in its integration with Office apps, which is where SkyDrive, Google Drive and Box.Net come out on top.įor some users, that won't be an issue, and if you need a lot of capacity for large files, then Bitcasa is an excellent choice. It’s easy to use, seems reliable (though it is still early days) and the price for infinite storage is pretty good when you consider that just 100GB will cost you £32 per year on SkyDrive or $4.99 a month on Google Drive. Free apps for Android, Windows 8/RT and iOS offer similar functionality and a similar UI, plus automated upload of photos taken with your smartphone or tablet camera.Īt the moment, Bitcasa appears to have a lot going for it. There are built in file-browsers and viewers/players for photos, music and videos with reasonable, covering the most common file formats. You can easily download or share files, and access earlier versions with an intuitive calendar view. Use the browser-based interface to access your files, and Bitcasa has one of the most attractive and usable UIs of any cloud-based storage service. All the files and folders concerned will be replicated to a Bitcasa folder, Mirrored Folders, and any changes made to your local files will be synced. However, you’re also prompted during setup to mirror your PC, whether the whole shebang or just specific drives. Bitcasa works principally in two ways: you have the Bitcasa drive mapped as a drive on your computer, and you can simply drag and drop files and folders in, at which point they will be uploaded to Bitcasa’s servers. Having signed-up, you download and install the Bitcasa applet, then follow it through the setup procedure. On Windows, the service is certainly easy to set-up and use. This, Bitcasa claims, is how it can deliver so much storage for so little. In theory, the system of encryption Bitcasa uses allows users to be identified from their files, but in practice the risk isn't enormous, and it allows Bitcasa to de-duplicate files – such as music tracks – which might be stored by many users to save space. Bitcasa encrypts everything before you upload with 256-bit AES encryption, maintaining three copies for redundancy. The other big plus for Bitcasa is encryption. This has its downsides, in that Bitcasa's performance and usability is more dependent on your minute-to-minute connectivity, but on the plus side if hard disk capacity is limited, your Infinite Drive isn’t hogging all the space. While you get an icon on your desktop and a folder on your PC into which you can drag and drop files, your data isn’t being stored in the cloud and synced across your devices, but stored online with only the data BitCasa thinks you'll need cached locally. It has to be noted that while it looks like sync-based storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox, Bitcasa doesn’t actually work in the same way. If you’re involved in any enterprise that produces and deals with large files, including photos, video, print-ready layouts or graphics, then conventional cloud-based storage can get expensive. It’s a service with obvious allure for consumers, but will appeal to some small businesses as well. Bitcasa doesn’t simply want to give you an online copy of what’s on your hard drive, it wants to become your most important drive – a place where you can squirrel away all your documents, video, photos and music, and share them across multiple devices.
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