
Bitcasa: Infinite Storage (really?) - persona
http://bitcasa.com/
======
seldo
I don't care how smart your technology is, representing your product as
"infinite storage" is inaccurate and misleading. There is obviously no such
thing as infinite storage on a finite device, and saying you don't have to use
a "clunky web service" implies it's not a web service, when it obviously is.

I respect their need to find a sexy way to sell a cloud-storage-and-sync
product, especially since it's an increasingly crowded space, but this seems a
bit sleazy.

~~~
achille
They never mentioned it was free. So it's probably pay-for-what-you-use amazon
backed storage. I haven't seen anyone complain about Jungledisk using the
"Unlimited cloud drive storage" tagline.

~~~
sp332
Oh, I like this interpretation. Unlimited data for unlimited money :)

~~~
persona
maybe :) they announced it at $10/mo.

------
troymc
Oh good, I can finally build a simulation of a Turing Machine (with an
infinite tape).

~~~
X4
hahah, made my day!

------
evgen
When reading this so many red-flag warnings popped up that I could not decide
if they were deluded or frauds. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and
simply guess that they are deluded regarding the storage savings they will
eventually realize via de-dupe. Given that the founding team includes a bizdev
guy, a marketing guy, and a sysadmin/ops guy I am guessing that they can put
together a nice pitch and powerpoint, have some easy answers to the
operational problems of competing in this space, and have a lot of hand-waving
answers to the harder technical problems. The latter problem will probably end
up killing them unless we are just seeing a PR dump in preparation for a pivot
to being just another online backup company.

One major fly in this whole "de-dupe" claim is that it will probably not even
work out for them even if they did have some magic sauce to dance around the
de-dupe/crypto conflict others have noted. The problem is that the files which
users actually care about and want to back up are not the common files but the
ones which make their data unique; it is not the mp3s or hollywood videos that
matter, it is the data/content that each person has created that matters. If
my disks crashed, my online and offline backups were corrupted, and I needed
to rebuild my system I could get the common OS files in a hour, the mp3s and
videos would take a few weeks of passive torrenting, but the pictures, home
videos, and personal documents would be gone forever. It is these files that
matter for a backup services, and they are not going to be something that you
can de-dupe even if they were not encrypted.

Back when the term "de-dupe" did not exist and convergent encryption was
something we were inventing before the term existed the thought was that a
backup service employing these techniques would enjoy a massive savings in
storage costs -- it turned out that people cared less about backing up the
data that was easy to de-dupe and original data was a much larger portion of
what users uploaded than we expected. This was back when pics were a meg or
two and personal video was low bitrate, now that even a mobile phone is
dumping multi-meg pictures and you can get a HD video camera for a hundred
bucks I cannot imagine how anyone would convince themselves that de-dupe is
going to make any significant difference to the operational costs of such a
service.

------
gregable
Maybe it's like the yahoo mail infinite mailbox. They just severely limit the
bandwidth in/out, but storage is infinite. Given an infinite amount of time...

------
SODaniel
I have to say that I find it a 'little' sad that the entire post reads like a
Press Release, touting 'client side encryption' like something new and
exciting and two thirds down it's revealed that CrunchFund is an investor.

Poor author didn't even know when she interviewed them.

------
esutton
I'm confused, they mentioned at techcrunch disrupt that they are able to offer
infinite storage because they are deduplicating data. Fine. But they also said
that they will be doing client side encryption. Contradiction - encrypted data
cannot be deduplicated.

~~~
X-Cubed
Client-side encryption does not exclude server-side decryption, ie: only
encrypt it on the wire, not the storage device.

Like Dropbox.

~~~
esutton
from their faq: Your Data Is Secure Bitcasa encrypts your data before it is
sent to the cloud. It is actually impossible for Bitcasa to access any of your
data for any reason.

------
anrope
They really pushed the "infinite storage" point in their presentation. But
didn't they mention something about predicting which files to cache before
they are requested? I would have liked to see more focus on that. Otherwise,
it doesn't seem _much_ different from dropbox, which is more established.

------
itsnotvalid
We will see. Actually some backup companies also have such claims on storage
(e.g. <http://www.crashplan.com> <http://www.backblaze.com>)

Well this is also backed by CrunchFund.... we would see (seen via TCDisrupt)

~~~
htp
Er, I think you meant <http://www.backblaze.com/> . The link you've got goes
to a somewhat NSFW site.

~~~
itsnotvalid
I guess somebody got it fixed for me, thanks.

------
amcintyre
For, uh, small values of infinity? Or something?

I find that I don't run out of storage on my computers any more, so perhaps
I'm not their target audience. Best of luck competing in that space, though--
it seems pretty crowded already. :)

~~~
sp332
Yeah, it would be funny if the "service" is just to rent a Drobo attached to a
PogoPlug :)

Wait, I should do that...

------
nddrylliog
Just a reality check on your landing page: your #1 asset is a vimeo embed,
which causes several problems:

    
    
      1) I'm on roaming 3G, I'm not paying that much to know what you're about
      2) Flash is blocked by default so all I see is a black square
      3) You're royally pissing on blind/disabled people.
    

Besides, the color scheme / general theming is generally sub-par and difficult
to read.

The "Learn More" link is more informative, but still, I think you really badly
need a designer.

------
LeafStorm
From what I understand the concept is something similar to Dropbox, except
instead of simply syncing files between the folders on different computers
where all the files are physically present on each, it focuses on remote
access (possibly with an AFS-like caching layer).

And by infinite, they probably mean "as much as you are willing to pay for,"
or, during the beta, "as much as you want until it gets ridiculous."

------
covercash
I watched them present on the TC Disrupt feed. I wish one of the panelists
would have asked them how the file system stream impacts data caps imposed by
many ISPs.

~~~
joshu
Shit, I should have asked that.

------
rorrr
The problem with all these online storage services is uploading your data.

At my 1 mbit uplink it would take 97 days of non-stop uploading to upload 1TB.
That's if my ISP doesn't ban me.

------
TheAmazingIdiot
Ive got an "infinite stotage device" called /dev/urandom.

It does take a while to wait for your data to come back out :)

~~~
tianshuo
Even if /dev/urandom gives 10Gbps, a 1kb file would take 2^1018 Seconds, which
is 1.4E688 years. That's well over the length of the universe (1.3E10)

