Bitcasa experience?

[GreenKiwi]

Does anyone have any experience with Bitcasa?

www.bitcasa.com/

I'm thinking about using it to have all my music on... infinite drive in the cloud. And they cache N gigabytes of the information locally.

I'd put all my lossless files and have them everywhere. I'd probably need to have separate libraries for each machine, but the files would all be in one place.

Has anyone had any experience with it? Are their speeds fast enough for this?

[Deleted]

I can see where this would be very attractive for many users. However, I'm "old school" and I like to have dominion over my data files. Surrendering them to services such as BitCasa puts you at the mercy of the company AND your ISP. Additionally, there is NO way that file retrieval from the cloud can come anywhere near the speed of local storage. Not unless you live in Japan where 100Mb/sec access is quite common.

I have an enhanced Comcast account and my download speeds are around 24Mbps - this is 24 Mega-bits per second. Remember, each Byte is comprised of 8 bits. So a 24 Mbps download speed translates into 3MBps - note the upper-case B for bytes. This means that if I wanted to download a 6GB file, a pretty common size for DVD Video, it would take me approximately 2,000 seconds to do so. And this does not account for transmission line latency, the overhead incurred from additional server hops, and on and on. Anyway, 2,000 seconds translates into about 33 minutes to downlaod the file or about 5.5 minutes per GB.

If I need to restore a 2TB drive full of files, it would take me 2,000 * 5.5 minutes or 11,000 minutes, 183 hours or approx. 7.5 DAYS. Sorry, folks, but I can't wait 7 1/2 days to restore a crashed drive. Using local storage, I can do something like this in less than 24 hours.

Additionally, call me paranoid or whatever you like, but the thought of relinquishing my data to a faceless entity over whom I have no real authority doesn't sit well with me. Remember, absolute authority tends to corrupt absolutely. And I'll be damned if I'll take the chance that some pencil-necked bureaucrat in a far-away office can determine if I can have un-fettered access to MY data. I have worked *deep* in the bowels of the Federal Govt. (FBI, White House, Homeland Security, etc.) and private industry, and many of those folks are incompetent and some of them are just plain evil.

So, while Cloud Storage is a nice idea, and will probably work for some of you, if you're *really* serious about the access to and the integrity of your data and having viable backup/restore capability, you are MUCH better off sticking with tried and true local drives...

-RW-

[GreenKiwi]

I definitely agree on the restoring 2tb of data. But if it can sustain 12mbps download, it should be able to view any non HD video. And certainly any audio. Heck, with LTE I might even be able to listen to alac on my iPhone. Not that I think that matters too much.

I'm just looking for a bit more convenience that I currently have. Right now managing files on and off of my 10TB nas can be a pain. This seems to have an effective local cache of the most recent files you've used.

[Deleted]

Oh yeah, for that kind of usage it seems ideal. But my needs extend way beyond that. Anyway, it appears they'll give you 10GB for free and you should probably avail yourself of that option...

-RW-

[jdskycaster]

Not putting my data in the cloud anytime soon.

[indyscammer]

No cloud for me either. I plan to create my own cloud. With JRiver you can setup to access your own hard drive from anywhere with Android or PC. I'm sure there are other ways too.