A bit ago I wrote a posting about how I left Dropbox and Google drive for a new service called Bitcasa, sadly all good things come to an end. I can no longer recommend Bitcasa because of the change in their service and plans. When I signed up and got the service they still had an unlimited plan that would let you store as much as you wanted. One of the features that I really liked was the need to not have everything sync to your computer, your files would stream over the internet when you wanted them. As I pointed out, this was great for me because I had a Macbook Air with a smaller hard drive. I felt this was better then both Google and Dropbox because they required you to have your files synced to your computer.

So, what happened? The unlimited plan was dropped, but for a short time they grandfathered anyone with an unlimited plan. This was only temporary until they upgraded their service, changing their pricing plan completely and forcing users to transfer to their new service with a new plan or their files would be deleted. I had around 700gb saved on Bitcasa at that time. I picked to transfer to the new service with a new plan to give myself time to download the files I wanted. After transferring, I found myself unable to use Bitcasa at all, and this was the case for over a month. Working with customer service did not solve anything, the primary issue seemed to be too much of a load on their new infrastructure. I’m still working on downloading my files and I have come to the conclusion that I am not going to be able download it all.

Overall I feel that the company’s focus has changed from being a customer driven company to a company that offers services for other businesses to build upon using Bitcasa technology. I think the next time I look at a service like this I’ll be more cautious. One of the things I relaxed upon was ensuring I had a local copy of my data, this was my mistake but one that I will not make again.

Another service I recommend people looking at which offers similar features is called Space Monkey, it is a very interesting idea. There’s a hardware component that allows them to store files without the need for data centers. This also allows for faster transfer rates when you are on your local network.