Bitcasa is definitely a game changer. It offers infinite (!) cloud storage mapped as a drive on your computer (just like SugarSync are now doing with Sugarsynch Drive) for 99 US$ per year. Accessible from anywhere with internet access. I mean: what more do I need to say…
The reason for this quick blog post is that Bitcasa currently have an opening special offer where you can get the whole thing for 69 US$. Apparently until the end of February. However: having tested Bitcasa for a couple of weeks now (when it was still free for beta testers), I have to say: nope. I’m not paying for this service just yet. There are too many problems. Little bugs, glitches and inconveniences that just don’t make it feel right yet. Don’t get me wrong: the support is fast and doing a good job, but I’ve spent too much time with this already and if I pay, I want it to save time for me.
I was thinking: okay, if this offer is about 69 US$ yearly subscription fee for ever, then I would actually consider signing up. But unfortunately, Bitcasa told me that the 69$ is only for the first year.
The thing is that Bitcasa is simply not out of beta stage. They seem to sense that themselves, as their blogpost announcing the end of the beta phase is entitled “The End of Beta as You Know It”. Haha. So now we’re in beta-v2, or what? A few weeks ago, I told Bitcasa support that I think they should be honest revert to alpha. But I guess investors are standing in the door, tapping their fingers. I hope they won’t ruin it.
Anyway, I will wait another year or so, until my harddrive is overflowing or so, and reconsider a paid account. For now, I signed up for a four year Crashplan+ Family Unlimited account. It’s not the same thing, but it also offers infinite storage and since I was mainly looking for online and automatic backup, it’s clearly the best option for me at the moment. The good thing is their risk-free cancellation policy, which means you can cancel anytime and get the money for the remaining months back. So unless you’re short of cash, there is no reason to sign up for any subscription shorter than 4 years, as that is the best value for money (around 9 US$) per month.
It’s the most expensive web-service that I have so far subscribed to, but when I almost lost years of work a couple of weeks ago, I decided: I need to start backing up properly and I want it to be easy and convenient, so I guess I will pay for it.
Just two three more things about why I currently prefer CrashPlan to Bitcasa:
- Crashplan is not just for backing up and restoring to the same computer but you can selectively restore to any computer. So you can access all your files from anywhere too, just not as comfortably as in Bitcasa. In the longrun, this will be Bitcasa’s advantage, but for now I’m fine with Crashplan.
- Finding older versions of a particular file is not well solved in Bitcasa (check out their forum, where many people are suggesting to change the system, which currently requires you to know the day when that file was last changed.) In Crashplan, you can just select the file and see the different versions that have been backed up in a list and select the one you want.
- I managed to install Crashplan on on my ReadyNAS Ultra at home, which means that those 2 TB will also be backed up. Plus: I can also use my NAS as a secondary backup, in addition to CrashplanCentral. Since the idea of Bitcasa is not to backup the harddrive on my computer or my server, but to replace it, this feature is, and probably will not be available from them.
And what are your experiences with Bitcasa and/ or Crashplan?
software for scholars 
Here is one of many user reports that give you some more details/examples of the kind of problems people are experiencing with Bitcasa: http://support.bitcasa.com/entries/23252276-Experiences-after-a-month-of-using-Bitcasa
Re: Bitcasa. I was one of their initial beta users. Though Bitcasa has made some good progress on their mobile apps and user interface. Their biggest problem is they have no way of throttling their bandwidth usage. So if you are uploading 100′s of GB of data it will make your internet unusable. Worse off this issue has been reported by users (including myself) for almost a year now, their only response many months back (coming soon.) It’s a true disappointment, now that they are several months out of beta and they still do not have this important feature.
In a way, that is a luxury problem that you are describing, the luxury being that you bitcasa is giving you a lot of bandwidt. (But this doesn’t make it less of a problem, of course, and the reactions you describe fit my picture of the company). In my experience (being located in Europe), Bitcasa was never using my full bandwidth, even though I was uploading quite a bunch of Gigs. In fact, most of the time it was using way less than 1 Mbit upstream (which is not an issue when you have 6-8 Mbit Upstream). It was faster than Crashplan (about twice as fast), but that is still very slow when you are trying to get those gigs into the cloud. So, from my perspective, its interesting to see that what I experienced as a problem (bitcasa not giving me faster connections), might actually have been a solution for others (those closer to a bitcasa server and those with a narrow upstream bandwitdt).