Newcomer Bitcasa, which positions itself as a provider of “infinite” amounts of secure online storage, on Feb. 5 exited its beta phase and launched a new home and SMB service that can handle storage from any type of host: iOS, Android, Mac desktop, Windows Desktop, Windows RT and the Web.
For a flat-rate $10 per month, Bitcasa’s Infinite Drive enables users to store as many movies, photos, music tracks or documents in its automatic backup cloud service with built-in client-side encryption to ensure privacy. Infinite Drive also works hand-in-hand with a user’s own physical storage.
To entice new customers, Bitcasa is offering special pricing of $69 for a year of infinite storage — a 30 percent discount compared to the company’s regular pricing of $99 for a one-year agreement (or $10 per single month).
Bitcasa’s Infinite Drive is designed to work like a external hard drive that never crashes or runs out of space. Full sync capability is included; everything stored in the Infinite Drive becomes instantly available across all devices regardless of device capacity or file formats.
Everything is encrypted locally and backed up in the cloud, so user data is always safe and secure, Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda told eWEEK.
“Before long, gigabytes and terabytes of data aren’t going to matter anymore,” Gauda said. “When I started this company, I, like everybody else, had to deal with faulty external hard drives and the outrageous fees for limited file synchronization services.
“I believe that, with the launch of the Bitcasa Infinite Drive, hard drives (HDDs) are now dead. Our customers have stored more than 1.7 billion photos on the Infinite Drive, and this is just the beginning.”
Well, the extermination of personal storage hard drives might be stretching it a bit, but Gauda does make a point: Why buy physical storage when a service like this one is available? There are pros and cons here, of course, but Bitcasa does present an interesting option.
Bitcasa, based in Mountain View, Calif., was founded by former Mastercard and Mozy employees and backed by top-tier investors, including Horizons Ventures, First Round, CrunchFund, Pelion Venture Partners, Samsung Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.