Bitcasa: we tried, they tried, but it’s still been a disaster

Bitcasa: we tried, they tried, but it's still been a disaster

I’m afraid our seemingly never-ending quest for a reliable back-up service has hit the buffers again.

Seduced by its hugely competitive $10/month charges for “infinite” storage,  good mobile support and promised ease of use, we signed up to the Bitcasa cloud storage backup deal in February this year.

Bitcasa: we tried, they tried, but it's still been a disaster

Installing the program on our PC was simple enough, and after selecting the folders we wanted backed up, we sat back and waited for it to do its thing.

At first, things went smoothly, as Bitcasa successfully started to upload folders, but then the wheels came off its wagon.

Even though it wasn’t even half way through the upload, Bitcasa decided to declare itself ‘idle,’ and no amount of rebooting and reinstalling could get the thing to finish off the job.

An email was sent off to Bitcasa, and that turned out to be the start of a very long relationship with their tech support team.

To their credit, they usually answered promptly, but anyone looking for the promised ease of use may have baulked at receiving emails asking them to type in things like, ” %appdata\com.bitcasa.Bitcasa\Data” and to rename a folder from “*\velk* to *\velk_old*.”

bitcasa-back-up-disaster-1

As the months passed and over 40 emails were exchanged, Bitcasa stubbornly refused to progress any further with the back up, despite much time-consuming tinkering around with new  versions of the software and system settings.

Seeing as the whole point of a back-up service is to back up your stuff simply and without any bother, we’ve now officially abandoned Bitcasa and asked for a refund.

We can still see its potential, but our data is too precious to commit to a service that so far has failed to prove its reliability.

Maybe we’ll try it again in six months or so, but for now our mission to find the kind of back-up software we can trust is back on again. Sigh.

About mike s

Editor, wirefresh.com

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15 Comments on “Bitcasa: we tried, they tried, but it’s still been a disaster”

  1. It really surprises me how some people seem to be unable to use this service. I signed up in late march, uploaded to ton of stuff already and it still works great most of the time. There are some little problems sometimes but not too big ones.

  2. ….. but de facto Bitcasa is still alpha, if you are interested in that service, you should read carefully the support pages. There are tons of complains and much more promises by Bitcasa but nothing goes on. The integration i.e. in IOS is very bad, you can’t swipe from picture to picture like Dropbox, you have to klick every single picture. Streaming of HD content looks very bad, you cant download and read ebooks. I have payed in February for that service and there was not one day without problems. Every single day it tells me “uploading” but it is sending nothing, closing and starting again will continue uploading. Same to finalizing … and with a little bad luck after a week of uploading … all files are greyed out and useless …
    READ THE support and forum pages at Bitcasa ….!! @ support.bitcasa.com

  3. i installed Bitcasa on Windows 7
    Instructions say to click on taskbar icon or throw things into desktop icon.
    There is no icon in task bar and nothing on the desktop.
    I tried to re-instal, but message says cannot uninstal because “currently running”.
    Nothing shews up in Task Manager.
    The I drive is simply a folder saying how to get started.

  4. Bought a full 1 year storage on bitcasa and it appears in the system tray for about 5 minutes after startup before it freezes and cannot be restarted. Avoid this crap!

  5. Just experienced exactly the same! This service SUCKS! i just asked for a refund. what a waste of time!!!

  6. Did anyone manage to get a refund, and if so, how? I’ve been trying to get in touch with their customer service but no-one seems interested in replying to me… Bitcasa is terrible on iOS, doesn’t upload anything, crashes non-stop. Complete crap.

  7. BITCASA IS Rubbish …bitcasa is rubbish…it will corrupt your files…not to mention how slow it is….You have been warned,…..RUN>>I paid for year and all my files have been corrupted …after months of saving…..I have a dropbox paid account that worked so good I unwisely thought the other cloud storage apps would work just as good ..like this bitcasa …I was very wrong …and i regret it ….

    Dont use this bitcasa and if you have get all your files and run ….i cant imagine how a company can be this bad …to open up business with such a bad product …a storage company that cant store …We are not talking about comments or emails or some funny jokes…this is like people’s life savings , people’s data….months of work …just corrupted like that ……friends have told me to just forget that I ever had those files as the pain can make one sick….(am actually shaking form the shock as i write this) JUST RUN FROM THIS BITCASA >>>PLEASE I PLEAD WITH YOU,…I don’t want what happened to my data in the hands of bitcasa to happen to my worst enemy…PLEASE RUN from this bitcasa, as fast as you can and tell your enemies too…..the bitcasa will bite your data to shreds …it happened to me …NEVER EVER USE IT.one big Fraud, scam

  8. I wanted to love it too. I ran into all of the same problems. Then it occured to me I have spend enless hours on this service trying to get it to work and it wasnt worth the trouble. They dont seem to get that fact that I have never had the latency, upload problems, or even the .exe crashing all the time like I did with Bitcasa. I would rather pay a little more to Google or Drop Box and have a more intelligent service. Oh and their synching problem deleted 35 GB of photos on my local drive. It’s a piece of crap

  9. I’ve spent a frustrating four hours with their “Zendesk” (ironic name for a very unhelpful helpline) after a crash and have to agree that they’re no good. Any advice on getting a refund?

  10. I will add my chorus to the poorly engineered technology.

    Initially, after reviewing half a dozen potential providers (for cloud storage, not backup), chose Bitcasa for its elegant pitch, promise of streamline, simple, spare design that “just worked” — no hassle, no fuss.

    After several months of problem-filled usage, I’m ready to pack it in.

    My experience leads to the following criticisms, several already mentioned:

    (a) SLOWWWW,

    (b) unreliable — worst of all there is no “state” indicator so it is never clear where in the process Bitcasa is. The UI appears to be completely out-of-sych with the back-end process

    (c) freezing UI — related to (b), making for a frustrating inability to get to the bottom of what’s uploaded successfully and what hasn’t. Definitely not “upload and go”.

    (d) Features broken — some key features (batch file zip download) randomly fails

    (e) incredibly slow rate of improvement. First used the service in January, found & logged these issues. Now it’s September — no changes to service, and some features that used to work no longer do.

    All in all. I think this is a case of beautiful startup, nice pitch, not got the engineering / design / integrity chops behind the operation to deliver the promise.

    Sorry Bitcasa, delivering a promise is a *bit* harder than just making the *casa* for one…

  11. I wanted so much to love Bitcasa, but it’s just not reliable. I can’t trust that it has done anything – and having to check every actual manually negates all potential value in the service.

  12. I too wanted to love it, so it’s nice to see people feeling the same pain as me. And now with the “enhancements” and a massive increase in the monthly fees, Forget it. Now we’ve all got 2 weeks to clear out the storage with download speeds hovering around 1mb/s. Looks like i’m not going to get it all off before they close the door.

  13. Yes agreed. Terrible customer service. They will at a moment notice simply discontinue your plan and increase the price of the remaining plans. They will NOT honor your contract. And clearly don’t care about customers. Look some where else !!!

  14. agreed bitcasa is simply terrible on so many levels, including reliability, customer service, speed, convenience, etc.. now, bitcasa has done away with infinite storage and given its customers a few weeks to transfer all their files. it’s so slow–uploading is a nightmare. will stay on while researching other cloud services. wish it would work as great as dropbox, which, however, is quite pricey for the same amount of storage

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