Bitcasa Review – Unlimited Cloud Storage and Syncing for Your Files for 69$ Per Year

We have heard a lot about Bitcasa. The ominous unlimited cloud storage and synchronization service that promises to solve all of your problems with the cloud. While there are a lot of online backup services offering unlimited storage, there is yet none that offers unlimited file synchronization as well. It almost sounds too good to be true, and yet, they have done it. 

From now on you can officially access and purchase Bitcasa for your personal cloud storage needs. Being an unlimited it is impossible to run out of space. Of course, ‘unlimited’ is just marketing gibberish that means you can store as much files as you want without running into limitations from the providers’ side. No service in the world could actually store an unlimited amount of data. Common sense, right? But still worth mentioning – you never know what people think.

• 10GB Free cloud storage 
• Now only 69$ per year for infinite storage and sync
• Use it on your mobile, too

There are, however, some nifty services, that do limit some features, for example, bandwidth making file transfers terribly slow. Bitcasa seems to stay away from such user experience inhibiting practices providing a real unlimited solution. 

Bitcasa Review

Bitcasa has desktop applications for Windows, Mac and Linux (in alpha). The interface for Bitcasa is minimal; Bitcasa integrates into the file system appearing as a drive, with a drive letter ‘I’ on Windows or a favorite location on the Mac.

The infinite drive, is the whole reason why Bitcasa wants you to “Ditch the external hard drives, and store your files in your Bitcasa Infinite Drive to free up space on your computer and phone”.

How to get started with Bitcasa

Installation of Bitcasa is pretty straight forward. The setup can be downloaded from the Bitcasa download page.

You can sign up on the link below to get a free month of infinite storage before installing the client, or you can sign up for Bitcasa from within the software after installing.

After logging in for the first time, there’s a quick introduction.

In the end of the tutorial, Bitcasa asks you select the folders you want to mirror.

As the image suggests, the folders you set to be mirrored will be stored online without changing anything about the way it already exists on your hard drive, offline. Don’t worry if you’re not sure about what folders to select, you can always mirror more folder later (or stop mirroring for that matter).

Bitcasa on your desktop

There are two ways in which you can store your files on Bitcasa using the desktop client, you can just push your files onto the Infinite Drive or you can “mirror” your files to the infinite drive.

When you copy files to the Bitcasa infinite drive, the files are uploaded to the cloud. It’s as simple as that, Bitcasa does all the complex work in the back. But copying files on to the Infinite Drive in the desktop application sometimes takes quite a bit of time just to copy it locally. If the files are very big, it may take even more time to upload even after the files are copied. The system tray icon shows you how much data is yet to be uploaded.

You can also right click on a file or folder to copy it directly to the root directory of the Bitcasa Infinite drive on Windows.

Mirroring, on the other hand just creates a copy of the files present physically on the computer; essentially backing up the computer. These files can be accessed through folder the named “Mirrored Folders” on the Bitcasa drive.

To mirror a folder, just right click on a folder and click on the “Mirror this folder to Bitcasa”. Again, the upload progress can be seen by right clicking the system tray icon. You can also use the same menu to stop mirroring a folder.

Just like copying files onto Bitcasa, accessing your files is super easy. You can access your files by opening them directly from the Infinite Drive. If streaming isn’t your thing or isn’t supported by the size of your bandwidth pipe, you can copy the files onto a location on your physical drive and access them after they’ve been downloaded.

The “Mirrored Folders” directory in the Infinite Drive contains all the mirrored folders from all your devices. The mirrored folders are sorted by their device of origin. All mirrored folders inside this directory are read-only, meaning you can only access or copy the files from their folders.

Bitcasa Web Interface

The web interface, or ‘web access’ as Bitcasa puts it, is the visible face of Bitcasa. As compared to the barely existent interface of the desktop applications, the delightfully flat and dark web interface of the web portal has an almost

Featuring five views – Folder, Music, Videos, Photos and Documents much like the mobile applications, the Web access provides an easy way of retrieving any data stored on Bitcasa through most of the newer Browsers.

Other than having the ability to upload files or delete files or folders, the web portal mostly allows read only access by allowing you to download files, view documents in-browser and play songs or videos. Though, Bitcasa hints that editing Documents might be possible in the future.

File Versioning 

Bitcasa’s web access has features unavailable in the desktop or mobile interface. The mighty File history feature, for example, is accessible through drop down menus. Using this, you can go back to any point in time, to retrieve previous versions of files or even files which have been deleted (To the likes of infinite deleted file retention like Crashplan and OpenDrive have). You can drill down to the exact hour and minute of the file version you’d like to download.

Bitcasa on mobile and other devices

Bitcasa has applications for iOS, supporting the iPhone and the iPad; for Android, supporting all Android devices; and also on the Windows Store, for all Windows RT, Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro devices.

The Bitcasa Android app provides simple and easy way to access files on the go. The tutorial and setup on the initial login provides a quick and almost complete overview of the client. With an interface identical to the web portal, the flat darkly themed app has the five views of Folders, Documents, Photos, Music and Videos similar to the web portal on the initial screen. In addition, the top tile-like sticky shows the most recent file opened or downloaded as well as an option for viewing favourite (or starred) files.

Bitcasa realized that the cloud-only hard disk dream is not very feasible for a mobile phone, so starring a file on the upper right corner allows the files to be access offline (such a feature is unfortunately not available for the desktop clients).

Other than that, Bitcasa can be used to stream music and videos from the infinite storage. There is also an option to connect the camera to Bitcasa – this feature enables Bitcasa to periodically upload all photos and videos on the mobile (either on 3G or if chosen, WiFi only) automatically. Just like how the Camera Roll is backed up to the iCloud in iOS devices, all the photos and videos on the mobile phone are ‘mirrored’ to an “Uploads” folder created at the root of the Infinite Drive when the option is selected.

The Security

Bitcasa initially touted to be a service with “zero-knowledge” encryption, meaning that no one including the staff at Bitcasa itself can access or even have a clue of what files you’ve uploaded online. Unlike popular services like Google Drive or Dropbox, where the provider can access your files in rare cases (legal situations for example), Bitcasa says that “Nobody at Bitcasa can see your data. We can’t even see the filenames. All we see are blobs of encrypted data. We don’t even know who owns them.”
So even if they were ordered by the government to decrypt an individual’s data, they might not be unable to help in anyway.

Currently, the website simply states Bitcasa uses “AES-256” encryption which the standard for military encryption. There have been other security concerns raised by users in the blogosphere and other places about the algorithms used; system deployed to decrypt data through the web portal or mobile application and the loopholes of the system of encryption itself (known as convergent encryption). Many have been answered and many remain unanswered. Bitcasa’s security sounds decent at least on paper, but without a comprehensive third party audit and/or certification taking place, we have a right to be skeptical of the security claims made by Bitcasa.

Bitcasa does claim to have patents pending, perhaps explaining why the details of the security have not been fully revealed.

The Technology

So you might wonder “How can Bitcasa really provide me with infinite storage for $10 a month?” The answer lies in their deduplication technology. Bitcasa stores only a single copy of every file stored on Bitcasa by any user. Bitcasa explains that they use the hash of the file itself as the key to encrypt the file, so in this manner, two identical files will be identical even after encryption, with only the users who have actually uploaded it having the access to the keys to decrypt the files they’ve uploaded.

The drawbacks

Bitcasa has security, storage with infiniteness for not only your Desktops or Laptops but also your mobile devices; what could possibly be lacking in Bitcasa? This was my first query, when I first chanced upon Bitcasa.

Bitcasa can predict what you might access (or stream) later, but surprisingly won’t keep in mind the files you would want to access offline. Bitcasa lacks file synchronization, in the truest sense of the word; it cannot keep files offline. Because it can only either just keep a read only copy (backup) of the files on your computer on the cloud or keep a single copy on the infinite drive, Bitcasa doesn’t let you work on the same files on multiple computers when you’re offline.

Leaving the conceptual side of the drawbacks aside, there are issues directly related to the usability. The “music view” on either the Web Portal or the Mobile applications require a “cache” to be built (akin to the thumbnail cache on Windows systems); I had about 500 GB of data while reviewing and less than 50 GB of that entire data was music – the web portal more than 10 minutes just to load this list of music files I had (on a single page). Issues like this probably arise due to the nature of encryption used by Bitcasa.

The stability of the applications is also a concern which has not yet been completely taken care of, the desktop and mobile applications do crash occasionally, though newer build with improvements are being constantly released by Bitcasa to fix bugs. The desktop client has gone from a crash every five minutes to absolutely zero crashes on my computer. The Android mobile client on the other hand still hangs up on me or is sometime forever stuck in loading.

With such shortcomings, Bitcasa probably cannot be your one size fits all solution to replace all the existing file storage, synchronization and backup services out there.

The prospects

Bitcasa has a decent mix of technology, financing, vision, usability and design; but some details ranging from small bugs to the complete usability in some situations have not been looked after. Bitcasa envisions killing all hard drives to keep all your data in the cloud; but with either the quality of the internet connections or issues with the Bitcasa service itself, the utopian dream is far from being achieved.

Until then, Bitcasa can be a regular file Backup, Archiving and Storage service. Do you think you can replace your current backup or storage solution with Bitcasa?