Imagine never having to worry about running out of space on
your laptop, tablet, or smartphone for pictures, videos, or documents; or even
having to remember where you saved a file. It’s a wonderful idea and we’re
getting closer, but we aren’t there just yet.
I got a glimpse of this future while trying the latest
service from Bitcasa,
a Mountain View, California-based startup that wants to take cloud computing to
its logical conclusion: allowing access any file, any time, no matter where you
are, so long as you have Internet access. (Bitcasa does cache a number of your
files on your machine so the files you use the most can be viewed offline.)
Previously in an open beta, Bitcasa left that designation
behind this month. The company also announced an updated Mac application, an
iOS app, and the arrival of a “freemium” model: anyone can sign up for the
service and get 10 gigabytes of free storage, or pay $10 per month to upgrade
to the infinite storage model (or $99 for the year, though the price is $69 for
that upgrade from now until the end of February).
Several companies provide easy-to-use cloud storage.
Dropbox, one of the most popular, offers users two gigabytes of free storage
and its plans start at $10 per month for 100 gigabytes, or $99 per year. That
sounds reasonable, but in America, we like our cloud storage capacity like we
like our fast food: bigger. And nothing is bigger than unlimited, right?
With that in mind, I decided to test Bitcasa’s Infinite
service on my own MacBook Pro, a Dell laptop I use for work, and my iPhone.
The company’s file-storage utopia is a great idea,
especially as we increasingly switch between laptops, desktops, smartphones,
and tablets, and gain reliable access to fast, wireless Internet. But to get us
to this digital Shangri-la, Bitcasa has plenty of work to do.
From the user’s perspective, Bitcasa is fairly simple. You
install the software on your computer, and, much like when you slide a memory
stick into a USB port, a little green icon pops up called Bitcasa Infinite
Drive. In addition to offering software for PCs, Macs, and iPhones, Bitcasa
offers an Android app, an app for Windows 8 and RT machines, and even an
extension for Google’s Chrome Web browser.
This drive sits on your computer desktop, and you can copy
files to it by dragging and dropping them into it, or save them directly to it
so they’re stored there and need not be kept on your computer.
You can also mirror folders, which means that Bitcasa will
copy the contents of a folder to your drive, but you’ll also keep the items on
your computer so you can use them when you aren’t connected to the Web. Bitcasa
will keep track of any changes you make to files in these folders, and keep
them synched with the cloud-based version. If, like me, you’re horrible at
remembering to back up your files, this is an easy way to do so.
This simplicity is the coolest thing about Bitcasa: It’s
easy to figure out how to add files to your cloud, and find them once they’re
in there (though keep in mind that it can take a long time to upload large
files). All data you upload is automatically encrypted, too, which should help
reassure those concerned about storing sensitive data elsewhere.
It’s also very easy to share files with others—you create a
link to a file or folder on your computer or on Bitcasa’s website, and e-mail
it to your friends.
Another neat Bitcasa feature is the ability to see older
versions of your files. This is especially useful if you’ve worked on a project
over time and want to go back and see an earlier version, or if you delete a
file and then realize you actually need it. You can access this through a Web
interface, which I found a pleasant enough way to view Bitcasa files, despite
its irritating white-text-on-a-black-background theme.
Unfortunately, in practice, I experienced some difficulties
with the service. Initially, it was very slow to show changes on my different
devices, be it to files I modified or new files I added to folders in my
infinite drive (40 minutes to add a large folder of notes files, for example).
I often felt it would have been faster to just e-mail these things to myself.
This improved, however, after I downloaded an update to the software.
But files didn’t always go where they were supposed to when
uploaded, such as a slew of images from an SD memory card that somehow ended up
in the main Bitcasa drive, rather than in the folder with the rest of their
batch.
There was another problem, though admittedly I couldn’t
determine if this was the fault of my machines, Microsoft Word, or Bitcasa
itself: Though I tried repeatedly, I couldn’t upload a Word document to Bitcasa
on my Mac, make changes to it on my PC, save those changes to Bitcasa, then
open it up again on the Mac (or vice versa). Somehow, the files always got
corrupted or disappeared altogether. I had someone try replicating the problem
on a Windows 8 machine and a Macbook Pro and they didn’t experience the same
issue. I asked Bitcasa CEO and cofounder Tony Gauda about this, and he said his
team would try to reproduce it internally but he didn’t think it was something
they had seen so far.
I also had problems with the iPhone app. I briefly used a
test version, then switched to the first version Bitcasa rolled out publicly.
This one crashed nearly every time I opened it (I’m not the only one this has
happened to, according to reviews in the App Store). An updated version worked
better, allowing me to view photos, videos, music, and other files stored with
the service, but it seemed slow to access files.
Two standout features here were the ability to download
files to the iPhone so you can view them offline, and the capacity to connect
your camera to Bitcasa so it will automatically upload a copy of any video or
photo you take to the service. There’s no way to upload other files from the
iPhone, though, which you can do on an Android phone with Bitcasa.
Bitcasa’s basic premise is a great one, and it’s clearly
where computing and data storage are heading. First, though, it will need to
work out the kinks. [MITTechnology]
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