Other features to Bitcasa's service include client-side security. If you need access from a device that is not your own, such as in an internet cafe, you can also log into your Infinite Drive account through a web browser. Plus, desktop clients for Mac and Windows can be installed. It also improves security, as data no longer has to be sent back to the US, cutting down the risk that it could be intercepted en route.There are applications available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android and Windows RT. This will improve performance but, also, offer better protection on data privacy. So, European users will now be accessing a European data centre. All the same, this is an impressive debut for a new cloud storage service, with plenty of potential to improve.īitcasa has now announced that customers will now have data stored in their own regions. If, however, you need a solution to synchronise files across multiple PCs, or a service that enables collaboration between teams or people working on a project, then the other services are better bets. Where it falls short is collaborative features – you can’t share and sync folders as you can in Dropbox – and in its integration with Office apps, which is where SkyDrive, Google Drive and Box.Net come out on top.įor some users, that won't be an issue, and if you need a lot of capacity for large files, then Bitcasa is an excellent choice. It’s easy to use, seems reliable (though it is still early days) and the price for infinite storage is pretty good when you consider that just 100GB will cost you £32 per year on SkyDrive or $4.99 a month on Google Drive. Free apps for Android, Windows 8/RT and iOS offer similar functionality and a similar UI, plus automated upload of photos taken with your smartphone or tablet camera.Īt the moment, Bitcasa appears to have a lot going for it. There are built in file-browsers and viewers/players for photos, music and videos with reasonable, covering the most common file formats. You can easily download or share files, and access earlier versions with an intuitive calendar view. Use the browser-based interface to access your files, and Bitcasa has one of the most attractive and usable UIs of any cloud-based storage service. Photos, videos and audio files sometimes take a while to stream, making smooth playback awkward, but much here will depend upon your Internet connection and the size and bit-rate of the files you’re working with. Mirroring a whole computer or uploading folders full of photos still takes time, but Bitcasa will happily do it in the background without slowing your Internet access to a crawl. Changes to a synced photo were spotted within 90 seconds and took another minute to upload. Our usual 500GB bundle of test files uploaded in just under 40 minutes, and took 22 minutes to copy back to another PC. Meanwhile, the system tray panel provides instant access to the settings menu and a browser view of your Bitcasa folder on the Web, and while it doesn’t provide as much at-a-glance information as the Dropbox or SkyDrive equivalent, it’s still very easy to work with. You can also send files from Bitcasa via email, Facebook or Twitter. This, Bitcasa claims, is how it can deliver so much storage for so little.īeyond drag and drop controls, you can copy or mirror files and folders using simple right-clicks. In theory, the system of encryption Bitcasa uses allows users to be identified from their files, but in practice the risk isn't enormous, and it allows Bitcasa to de-duplicate files – such as music tracks – which might be stored by many users to save space. Bitcasa encrypts everything before you upload with 256-bit AES encryption, maintaining three copies for redundancy. The other big plus for Bitcasa is encryption. This has its downsides, in that Bitcasa's performance and usability is more dependent on your minute-to-minute connectivity, but on the plus side if hard disk capacity is limited, your Infinite Drive isn’t hogging all the space. While you get an icon on your desktop and a folder on your PC into which you can drag and drop files, your data isn’t being stored in the cloud and synced across your devices, but stored online with only the data BitCasa thinks you'll need cached locally. It has to be noted that while it looks like sync-based storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox, Bitcasa doesn’t actually work in the same way. If you’re involved in any enterprise that produces and deals with large files, including photos, video, print-ready layouts or graphics, then conventional cloud-based storage can get expensive. It’s a service with obvious allure for consumers, but will appeal to some small businesses as well. Bitcasa doesn’t simply want to give you an online copy of what’s on your hard drive, it wants to become your most important drive – a place where you can squirrel away all your documents, video, photos and music, and share them across multiple devices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |