Bitcasa was (in my opinion no longer is) a very promising cloud data storage provider - a bit like Dropbox except for two practical differences: Firstly the Bitcasa desktop application mounts your Bitcasa drive as a network volume, rather than syncing to a local folder (so it can hold more data than your hard drive). And secondly the data is encrypted both in transit and on the server. They also offered "infinite" storage for a very reasonable fee. In principle it was great.

Rachael has been using it (on my advice) to back up her photography work (~80GB of new images per week), and now has several terabytes of TIFF and RAW files in her account. We've been running an automated upload process every evening and had a further 10TB to upload. The data is also on RAID hard drive units but, as it's business critical information, a remote backup seemed sensible.

Unfortunately on 23rd October Bitcasa announced that they were discontinuing the infinite accounts and were going to be offering a 1TB or a 10TB service for $99 or $999 per annum. For those in the early pricing scheme and with over 1TB of data this amounts to a roughly tenfold increase in annual cost.

"You have between October 22, 2014 and November 15, 2014 to migrate your data"

The other key part of the announcement was that there was a 15th November deadline (just over 3 weeks) to either migrate the account or to download all data, otherwise it would be deleted. That such an unreasonably short amount of time has been given reeks, to me, of some corporate / financial "emergency" measure, but that's just speculation.

Bitcasa has always felt, in my experience, a bit "beta": uploads are much slower than with Dropbox and are very processor intensive. This is, I understand, related to the encryption processing but generally (particularly more recently running it on a new computer) it's been usable. We've never had much reason to download files from it though.

Rachael was (grudgingly) willing to upgrade her account to the $999 10TB package in order to buy enough time to find an alternative long-term solution, but it isn't working. More than 20 attempts to run the account upgrade process have failed with a server error. Several support tickets I raised have not been answered after several days, except one which was marked by them as "Solved" with a generic advice response.

Awkward indeed... It doesn't bode well. Maybe they're just being swamped with user requests but it feels to me like they are going under.

We have therefore been trying to salvage critical data from the account, but the process is slow and unreliable. Despite us having (according to speedtest.net) an 80Mbps download connection speed, downloading 1GB from Bitcasa is taking about 2-3 hours, when dragging the file out of the Bitcasa drive using Finder on the Mac. And more often than not the operation fails after 40 minutes or so.

The alternative - downloading via their web app - isn't much better. It's faster but trying to download more than one file at a time results in a corrupted zip file. Not very practical when you've got a folder with hundreds of files in it. Even Bitcasa recommend avoiding it (in a support response):

"We recommend not downloading multiple files through the web portal. If one of the file(s) is damaged, it will break the entire zip file. Downloading single files from the web portal should be fine."

However, this morning I discovered that moving files in the Terminal is much more reliable. A lot of the problems seem to be related to the Finder. It's going to take right up to the deadline to get all of the data but it is now, finally, just about feasible.

On balance, for us, speed and reliability are more important than encryption for this use-case. So we're moving the data to Amazon 'Glacier' (via S3). Uploading directly to S3 is like a dream compared to Bitcasa, the data is uploading at over 2 megabytes per second.

The sad thing is that we were willing to pay $999 to migrate the Bitcasa account but then technical failures and lack of support simultaneously made it impossible to do this, and destroyed any confidence we had in the system that we would have been paying for anyway.

It looks on the face of it like Bitcasa are moving more towards a business-to-business API-driven service provider but this is basically a big "fuck you" to all their existing customers. If I were one of their investors I would be less than impressed.