It adds up to a very different proposition to Dropbox, which is priced in a way that encourages you to use it to sync important files you need frequent access to, not for long-term backups (The personal version offers 2 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.99 a month and 100 GB for $19.99 a month). My guess is that Bitcasa’s success will hinge on how well they can help users deal with a service designed to be forgotten about that very occasionally reminds you of its existence in a frustrating way, when you can’t access your data. I haven’t used it long enough to tell if that’s the case for the beta version. Last year I heard their software would try and guess what you are most likely to need access to offline and make sure it’s stored locally. That design does create the capacity for you to be surprised by how long it takes to access a file, or even to find you can’t access all your data. They’d take some time to download if you tried to open them, but it would be less hassle than using an external drive. Bitcasa could make them appear to be on your computer at all times so you could dig up an old song or photo with a few clicks. That trick could make it much easier to manage a vast movie, music or photo collection larger than your hard drive, for example. You can see them there using a file browser or a program’s open dialogue, but some files will be retrieved from the cloud when you try to open or access them. Bitcasa arranges for some of your data to be stored only in the cloud, not on your PC, but it creates the illusion that all your files are stored locally. The clever bit is what happens when you try and pile in more data than there is space for on your hard drive. Any time you save, copy, or paste new files into a cloudified folder they also uploaded. Cloudified folders are uploaded to Bitcasa’s cloud right away and get a Bitcasa logo added to their icons in the Finder. Once you install Bitcasa it prompts you to choose which of your folders to “cloudify”.
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