Bitcasa Review

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12 responses to “Bitcasa Review”

1. 

   Matt

   Bitcasa is the WORST!

   Cons:
   -Everything is miserably slow. Web interface, searching, loading pictures or any kind of media. On their Nov 2014 “upgraded servers” too.
   -It’s unacceptably buggy. Every update introduces a bunch of new MAJOR bugs. They duplicated my data in the latest migration 3 times and I can’t friggin delete it! How am I supposed to keep my GB count reasonable if I can’t delete??
   -They stole my money and I had to demand a refund when they double charged me. They did refund me, but it’s ridiculous that I had to ask.
   -Nothing but bad news and downgrades since their inception.

   I’m dumping them for SOS Online Backup. If Bitcasa lived up to their promises and if all the great features their supposed to have actually worked, they’d be spectacular. Even without infinite storage. The only confidence I have in Bitcasa now is that they’ll fall short, disappoint, and frustrate me. What a shame.

   Reply
2. 

   mrs p

   Mac user. I treat the bitcasa infinite virtual drive just like an attached usb drive. I generally do the software eject of any of my usb drives before I shut down my computer. I EXIT Bitcasa before I shut down my mac. No problems. I no longer let bitcasa automatically detect or backup my external drives or any drive because I found it way way too slow. Took over my resources too much, slowed me down – became like molasses. However I have found that by hand selecting small batches of files at a time, dragging and dropping to bitcasa’s wonderful virtual drive, I took control back and after patiently working at it for a few days – I eventually got everything I wanted to, backed up to bitcasa without it being so painfully slow. Do it in bite-sizes and it will work and will stop driving you crazy. ALSO – I found a way around the frustration of not being able to use spotlight to search for files on bitcasa. I bought DevonThinkPro Office 2 and I learned the hard way to NOT put everything into ONE database. Instead I learned to create several smaller databases and to keep them and use them exclusively on bitcasa. I am able to search and find files by having them loaded in DevonThinkPro Databases ON my bitcasa virtual drive. I learned I can copy and paste backups of my DTP databases to usb flash drives pretty fast by copying and pasting, while making sure NOT to have DTP open and running when I’m copying a database to hold on an external drive as a backup. I have learned to keep the files sorted in folders on Bitcasa and then copy an extra set from there to my DevonThinkPro databases. Thus the files that I place in DevonThinkPro are backed up in their original form within organized folders on Bitcasa FIRST before I dump any into DevonThinkPro. Then my DTP databases are backed up by being on both bitcasa (just one copy) and then on an external hard drive or flash drive. I learned these work arounds and secure protective measures the hard way – by making mistakes while learning to use both these products. Bless Bitcasa’s little hearts for finally giving us enough – space. UNLIMITED. I got in on the $99 per yr unlimited plan just before that window of opportunity closed. Do you realize though – that $99 per month for unlimited doesn’t just give you $10 per 1 GB as everyone was trying to do to us before I finally found bitcasa! It is giving you more like $10 per 1 TB if you were counting in terms of Terabytes. There was nobody available offering what I needed at any kind of price I could afford when I needed access in the cloud because i’m never in one place long enough to manage a bunch of networked drives. I couldn’t afford the $10 per GB prices that were out there. Bitcasa was a heaven sent answer to prayer – literally. Now what we really need badly is FASTER UPLOAD speeds offered by our ISPs!!! THANK YOU BITCASA! Thank you Thank you Thank you! You’re TERRIFIC! By the way, Bitcasa is wrong in my opinion when they say that 90+/- % of their users don’t care about space as much as just having the security of cloud backup and access everywhere. STORAGE SPACE at an affordable price as well as ACCESS are BOTH extremely important! Thanks for letting me post.

   Reply
3. 

   Dlugi

   bitcasa.com is typical american crap… if they are able to change price plan in one day – from ~10$ per month to 1000E per year, they are also able to use universal keys for data encryption…

   In my opinion its one big american bs…

   Reply
4. 

   willemijns

   > I checked speedtest to San Jose, where their servers are located and the results were fine

   stop comparing by town… it depending of the datacenter, bitcasa kind of servers cpu/memory, BW allowed and more and more !!!

   Reply
   1. 

      Steven

      Bitcasa tech were the ones who told me to speedtest San Jose. Thanks for playing!

      Reply
5. 

   Steven

   I signed up for a year. It’s a good idea. However, having your “infinite drive” be on the internet means that you are limited to the up and download speeds of the internet. At times, things get prettty slow going with bitcasa. I checked speedtest to San Jose, where their servers are located and the results were fine, so their servers were getting slammed or something. They had no “record” of outages or problems. Go figure. I’ve opted for, therefore, for Box.com. It’s much faster and I have the data on my drive as well. I have faster access to it.

   Pros:

   Unlimited Data
   Customer service chat
   Good interface

   Cons:

   Can get really, really slow going at times. Frustrating.

   Reply
6. 

   Micha

   During the past 2 weeks I played around with Bitcasa beta version, just to taste and get the feel of their product. Today, as Bitcasa left beta, I upgraded for the paid infinite plan.
   Bitcasa grew on me very well. The mirroring feature is not a con, as you put it in the pros and cons lists. It is a good thing, allowing much more control over changes you make in your files, bearing in mind that some of your machines with Bitcasa installed on, you share with other rascals in your family. Bitcasa also hint about full syncing feature in the future.
   Using the web site for streaming media is a delight. music and video don’t seem to pause to buffer as do so many other competitors.
   Music page is nice, functional and informative. What would a music buff need more?

   Bitcasa is now spoiling us beta users by allowing them the use of free infinite drive for the next 2 months. But then they might loose the benefit of 30% discount on the year plan, which will last only this month.
   Much to my surprise, when I paid for my discount plan, Bitcasa cut off 50% of the deal – I was charged only 49$ instead of 99$. So, there you have it.

   Reply
   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      Thanks for thoughts on Bitcasa.

      You are correct that mirrored folders and files being read only perhaps should not be a con. The majority if backup services that offer access to your backup files are read only. It makes sense because you don’t want to access a file and then save it over top of the existing file in a backup.

      Reply
      1. 

         Dheeraj

         I think its more like the lack of synchronization (of files not on the Infinite Drive) which is a con; mirroring, at least of now is something like a backup as you contemplated on.

         The problem is that to edit files in Bitcasa, you have to edit the files in the Infinite Drive and not the mirrored folders. But the situation this creates is that –

         (i) To access the file again – You need to go to the Infinite Drive and you can’t collaborate so easily between multiple computers – files on the Infinite Drive are online only, they’re not stored offline.

         (ii) The Infinite Drive is completely inaccessible when there’s no internet. So this further worsens the problem while collaborating on or syncing documents/files.

         Though it seems that they will introduce an offline files feature, to “pin” or “mark” the files to kept offline in the long run to overcome such disadvantages.

         Reply
7. 

   willemijns

   hello,

   infinity for 10$/month, you must to be sure of their business-plan ^^

   Reply
   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      Well if Backblaze can do unlimited backup for $5.00/month, it might be possible. Very little is known about the data centers that Bitcasa uses. I read at one time they were using Amazon but that they had plans to move to their own. I imagine that has happened since they are close to coming out of beta.

      Reply
      1. 

         Dheeraj

         More importantly they use heavy deduplication, that is their big plan.

         I know what you’re thinking, dedup is not secure, but just like Dropbox, rather better than Dropbox, Bitcasa uses Convergent Encryption, along with more techniques to not only store only one copy of each file, but thoroughly encrypt it to such an extent, that even Bitcasa can’t figure what exactly you store.

         And they’re one of the only services, who don’t give a crap about how much you store. Their focus is always on improving their front-end, features and marketing. Unlike, carbonite or Livekive etc where there are Fair Usage policies or Throttling or limitations on the “unlimited” storage. Bitcasa doesn’t and their “amount of storage” plan is figured out. Their focus and work is somewhere else.

         They’ve received about 7 – 8 million dollars in funding. They’re not going anywhere; they’ve got their business model figured out.

         If you notice all their cons are related to the software but not related to the service per se. This is the area where they’re trying to build up on.

         As a whole I think they’re amazing, I’ve stored more than 700 gigs with them. I’m finally at peace with the huge amount of data I keep collecting!

         Reply