bitcasa--infinite storage on your desktop

DavidTO

I got into the beta for bitcasa. Not sure if I really want to do it, as it seems a bit risky at this point.

But I'd love to hear thoughts on it! :ear

ZBlack

I've been able to use the beta for a bit now as well and have yet to set it up. I honestly don't see it being very useful for me, but I imagine some people would think it's fantastic. Should probably set it up and use it to at least be helpful in the beta sense lol. So may do that. I'd be curious to hear thoughts on it as well from others who have used it or in general too.

lensmole

I am not sure about a web based system. What happens if their server goes down or something, does this mean you won't have access to your images ? I use external hard drives for back up, plus I have a custom computer with a large corporate hard drive for storage of images.

Richard

What could possibly go wrong?

As you probably know, I'm not fond of being the first on my block to try anything. Relying on a new product/company to store my data (especially large amounts of data) seems foolhardy. As a backup, it might be worthwhile if it proves to be technically stable and a viable business, but for primary storage my 10 Mb net connection is far too slow compared to local storage. Maybe someday, but for now I'd pass.

ZBlack

After more or less forgetting about it until DavidTO's post, It may have some small use for what I've been doing currently. By no means will I be using it for lots of stuff, or stuff I need locally a lot. But I have been sharing a fair amount of images and psd/tiff files among some friends. Been using Box.net with a shared folder. May give Bitcasa a try for that just to see how it functions, perhaps with some school work as well (while keeping a local copy and in dropbox).

Moving Pictures

It's offsite storage. Hardly rocket science, hardly new.

PS: Cloudify? Holy crap, the language is going to hell.

Icebear

Moving Pictures wrote: »

Holy crap, the language is going to hell.

Since the dawn of the spoken (and written) word, my friend.

DavidTO

Moving Pictures wrote: »

It's offsite storage. Hardly rocket science, hardly new.

PS: Cloudify? Holy crap, the language is going to hell.

It's more than just that.

Dan7312

I think to some extent bitcase is cloudifying the description of its service.

It is a bit more than simple offsite storage like Amazon S3 or simple replication like dropbox does.

Once you cloudify a folder, that folder is no longer physically on your machine, but your app's use it like it is on your machine. Of course bitcasa is doing some clever caching on your machine to make sure your app's don't slow to a crawl and to make sure that the files themselves don't turn into mush. So you end up with what appears to be seamless, unlimited storage.

So it's different than the other stuff out there and if they can actually make it work seamlessly I think that's at least minor rocket science.:D I think it is something I'm going to wait a bit on though.

Moving Pictures wrote: »

It's offsite storage. Hardly rocket science, hardly new.

PS: Cloudify? Holy crap, the language is going to hell.

Moving Pictures

Dan7312 wrote: »

Once you cloudify a folder, that folder is no longer physically on your machine, but your app's use it like it is on your machine. Of course bitcasa is doing some clever caching on your machine to make sure your app's don't slow to a crawl and to make sure that the files themselves don't turn into mush. So you end up with what appears to be seamless, unlimited storage.

Maybe I'm being remarkably dense, here, but I've been using something like that for more than year - free. Ubuntu has a free cloud option, and I store a fair bit of mission-critical stuff there. I can even access it for use by multiple machines.

Too, Googledocs and its like are also along the same vein, n'est-ce-pas?

I won't even go into the pre html days, when I could access my home computer from far away, using BBS software, and could launch software, such as word-processors, that would then allow me to edit files on that remote computer anywhere in the world. And this was in the early 90s.

:rutt

Dan7312

I'm not familiar with the unbantu cloud. But I think google docs is really web application. You don't store arbitrary files in goggle docs that arbitrary applications access as though they were on the local disk drive, which is what bitcasa claims they can do.

If the ubantu cloud lets arbitrary applications access arbitrary files that appear to be on the local disk from multiple machines without turning them into mush, that is impressive. As far as I know bitcasa only allows the machine that "cloudified" the files to access them. They seem to mention being able move a cloudified directory to another machine, but it sounds like a feature for the future. In fact from what they say it's not clear that the beta they have now can un-cloudify a directory.

But I think bitcasa's description of what the actually provide is not really all that clear.

Needless I'm skeptical about bitcasa doing what I think they say they can do. On the other hand their founders claim to have been key in developing a lot of the infrastucture the credit card companies use. Yeah, there have been a number of high profile cases where retailers have compromised credit cards, but I don't think the infrastucture itself has compromised, and the in terms of the scale of distributed transactions it processes and manages it's pretty impressive... so maybe bitcasa is really pulling off what they say they are.

Moving Pictures wrote: »

Maybe I'm being remarkably dense, here, but I've been using something like that for more than year - free. Ubuntu has a free cloud option, and I store a fair bit of mission-critical stuff there. I can even access it for use by multiple machines.

Too, Googledocs and its like are also along the same vein, n'est-ce-pas?

DavidTO

This may help:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImZWVxAQ_Q

Dan7312

I see a big white square... it's got me thinking so I guess that helps:D Sometimes images just don't work on my machine for some reason that I've never figured out.

DavidTO wrote: »

This may help:

<IFRAME height=315 src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3ImZWVxAQ_Q&quot; frameBorder=0 width=560 allowfullscreen></IFRAME>

DavidTO

Dan7312 wrote: »

I see a big white square... it's got me thinking so I guess that helps:D Sometimes images just don't work on my machine for some reason that I've never figured out.

It's a youTube video, so my guess is you don't have Flash installed? Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImZWVxAQ_Q

Dan7312

Yup, that's it.... it depends which browser I'm using....

DavidTO wrote: »

It's a youTube video, so my guess is you don't have Flash installed? Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImZWVxAQ_Q

Dan7312

Tnx, that clears up a couple of things. Like you can share files and move from one computer to another, but I don't think it provides simultaneous access... not that I would expect that because that's really hard. They also do versioning.

Not much about the infrastructure that actually supports bitcase or how backup is done etc. Still if it really does what they claim it's pretty impressive.

I still think I will wait until it's been released for a while before I jump on it or tell any clients they should.

DavidTO wrote: »

It's a youTube video, so my guess is you don't have Flash installed? Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ImZWVxAQ_Q

Richard

Dan7312 wrote: »

Tnx, that clears up a couple of things. Like you can share files and move from one computer to another, but I don't think it provides simultaneous access... not that I would expect that because that's really hard. They also do versioning.

Right. A file system can provide versioning (which has been around since VMS), but only an application can have the intelligence needed to synchronize simultaneous read/write access.

Dan7312

Actually file versioning was in RSX-11, which was the predecessor to VMS, and the PDP-10 operating system which also around before VMS. But I don't either of these OS's was the first to do file versioning, but don't know what was.

Richard wrote: »

Right. A file system can provide versioning (which has been around since VMS), but only an application can have the intelligence needed to synchronize simultaneous read/write access.

Richard

Dan7312 wrote: »

Actually file versioning was in RSX-11, which was the predecessor to VMS, and the PDP-10 operating system which also around before VMS. But I don't either of these OS's was the first to do file versioning, but don't know what was.

Right you are--I never worked with those. According to the Wiki, the first was likely ITS, developed and implemented at MIT.

Sorry for the hijack, David. Geeks will be geeks...

DeVerm

Surely many here must have used file servers like NFS-based, Novel Netware or even Windows Server or file sharing. All those give you what seems a local folder but it's on a remote disk somewhere.

This "new" technology sounds just like all that plus some local caching algorithms that are probably bugged... like they always are

Dan7312

Yes, that's true, but bitcasa claims that the files will perform like they are local to the machine because they have caching figured out based on your usage of files. We we will have to see.

DeVerm wrote: »

Surely many here must have used file servers like NFS-based, Novel Netware or even Windows Server or file sharing. All those give you what seems a local folder but it's on a remote disk somewhere.

This "new" technology sounds just like all that plus some local caching algorithms that are probably bugged... like they always are

DeVerm

Dan7312 wrote: »

Yes, that's true, but bitcasa claims that the files will perform like they are local to the machine because they have caching figured out based on your usage of files. We we will have to see.

Right

This will work as long as you play nice with it, i.e. don't go back to older pictures which you didn't access for some time. They can only cache a small part locally. I think we all have a system of archiving in place which will work better than whatever algorithm these guys come up with...

Dan7312

I am skeptical not only of the performance of bitcasa but whether or not they will truely keep files from turning into mush.

But in practice NFS and Windows file sharing doesn't work all that well over the internet anyhow, so almost any kind of caching algorithm these guys come up with will be better than those.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, you have to take the blue pill before you start to use bitcasa

DeVerm wrote: »

Right

This will work as long as you play nice with it, i.e. don't go back to older pictures which you didn't access for some time. They can only cache a small part locally. I think we all have a system of archiving in place which will work better than whatever algorithm these guys come up with...