BITCASA INFINITE DRIVE UPDATE
BITCASA INFINITE DRIVE FULL

If you are just starting out and don’t have terabytes of data that need to go up to the cloud, then Bitcasa may be a great solution for you. We Needed Cheap and Easy, Bitcasa is a great solution if you don’t mind waiting a couple months for everything to be up to date and in sync. Do I buy hard disks to back up my RAID hard disks? That seems ridiculous, and we are a mom+pop outfit, so I can’t be backing up to tape and so forth. As such, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about that. A RAID controller could fail or two drives could fail together, or lightning could fry all four. However, as anyone familiar with RAID knows, it’s not a backup solution and you can lose everything. In short, the idea is that any single hard drive can fail and no data would be lost. We have a Synology drive running in Hybrid Raid mode it has 4x3tb(WD RED) Hard Drives inside ~ and that gives us approximately 8 Terabytes of space with single disc allowable failure. Jamie and I primarily work off of our NAS/RAID drive. I have to give you all an idea about what our setup is like at Pabst Photo before I can go foward.

BITCASA INFINITE DRIVE FULL

So if I wanted to drop a file into the drive – it might not be there for a couple weeks if my que is full of 30gb ahead of that file I want. I have learned that I prefer to manage my own CACHE and leave it to about 4gb otherwise it eats my RAM and baloons to 30-40gb at a time and I can’t use Bitcasa in a helpful way because I can’t control the que.

BITCASA INFINITE DRIVE UPDATE

UPDATE 6-11-2013 – I now have 550gb stored on Bitcasa. Trying to push the past ten years up to the cloud however is simply not possible.

Perhaps 100gb per year would be very realistic. That said, I do think it’s realistic to upload your high value content for extra security. It is simply too slow to upload the amount of data I want to upload. Will this service be fast enough for you? After these two weeks, I think I will continue to use the service, just not how I initially planned. UPDATE: I have been uploading on an extremely fast internet connection ( at 10mb/sec upload) for about two weeks now and have successfully uploaded 110gb. Once we realize that, we can more easily accept that in the year 2020 when we take that HDD out of the drawer, it might not work. We have to accept that we will likely never need that RAW image again. The RAW image however might be on an external HDD and shoved in a drawer labeled YEAR 2009. So, sure, you might want two copies of that image you took of your newborn one on your NAS and one on the cloud in JPEG.

At some point we have to decide what data needs multiple redundancy and what doesn’t. The photo of your sons first steps cannot be cared for the same as the video from the gopro on your helmet capturing you skiing last weekend. Commit to an image like the great photographers before you. My first recommendation to anyone who is ready to take the leap into getting serious about digital backup–you have to have a hierarchy of data importance. I’d love to keep every RAW image I’ve ever taken in case I want to go back and edit it differently or get back to a color version that I have since made black and white but at some point we all need to stop being digital babies and E-HOARDERS. I am coming at this post from the perspective of a photographer, but anyone with hundreds of gigabytes of data will hopefully find this post helpful.

I have been using Bitcasa Infinite Storage for a couple days and will give my initial thoughts below.

Bitcasa infinite drive