Bitcasa vs. Dropbox vs. ???

[intelli78]

I am familiar with Dropbox and Google Drive, i.e., how they're primarily meant to mirror files on your HD and in the cloud.

But, I'm looking for a service that works more like an online hard drive, i.e., that lets you free up space on your HD and is not primarily meant for mirroring. Although if it could do both competently, that would be great.

I think this is what Bitcasa does, but it's a little hard to tell. Anybody use them? Or familiar with any other services that work better than Dropbox/Drive for freeing up HD space?

[byker]

Do you use Windows 8? I use onedrive as it has 30gb of free storage, and I use it to store documents that I want to access from several different computers! Sorry if this isn't what you are looking for..

[twiddle]

For what it's worth though I think that Google Drive isn't really designed to mirror files, in particular documents.. Once you convert the documents to Google formats, the local copies are basically just URL shortcuts (other files will be mirrored locally intact still).

I'd be inclined to simply use Dropbox, upload everything, then turn on Selective Sync and delete the local files after deselecting the folders they are in.

[jdcarpe]

With Chrome OS, the default is to use Google Drive for storage. Most Chromebooks and Chromeboxes only have 16GB or at max 32GB flash storage built in. No reason you can't do the same under any other OS, as well.

[tp4tissue]

What is all this n00bness...

A GHer don't haz own FTP ?..

[rainb1ood]

I have my FTP sort of, its a seedbox basically so it has FTP

[boost]

freenas + owncloud = WIN!

[heedpantsnow]

(Will post later when I have time)

[IvanIvanovich]

So far, for free I like best onedrive. It offers the most space for free and it works well enough. If I don't want it on disk just choose 'make available online only', done. onedrive also has one of best prices if you want to pay for a good deal of storage. But, if I cared a lot about cross platform I would probably use googledrive more. I really only use google drive with the docs part, and occasionally to share something which seems to have less steps and work better.

[heedpantsnow]

OK, now I have a few minutes.  I've done a ton of research and have a fair amount of experience with this since I've lived on various continents and for a while was keeping the majority of my data in the cloud (much of it encrypted).  Feel free to ask questions.

Bitcasa:  STAY AWAY.  Their speeds are OK, features are pretty good (stream media from their website or apps), prices are bad, but business practices suck a$$ (They made promises not to raise prices, encouraged people to upload all their stuff; raised prices, but told existing customers "don't worry, you're grandfathered"; then gave 'grandfathered' customers less than 30 days to get their stuff out, pay 10x price, or get deleted; was bad enough that there are lawsuits now)

Dropbox:  most mature and stable of all the clients I've used, but expensive; quite fast.  Uses block level syncing, so doesn't sync the whole file..only the part that's changed.  Useful if you keep Truecrypt containers, etc. in the cloud.  I now only use their free account, and mainly for the files that need that type of sync.

Onedrive:  copious amounts of space, pricing is phenomenal, speed is okay.  Client isn't as full-featured as others.  Nor as stable in some situations (for example, if you run out of disk space in crashes and corrupts the cache so it has to start over from scratch).  Has a nice feature where you can select files to keep only in the cloud but still has placeholders locally (this probably will change in next Win version).  Takes a bit longer to sync across machines (for example, I have a torrent folder in Dropbox where I drop in .torrent files and my server watches that folder to auto start the download; takes minutes with Dropbox, but anywhere from 30-120 mins with OneDrive), but this is a special usage case.

Crashplan:  use it for its unlimited backup on up to 10 machines, reasonably fast if you do the tweak to disable client-side duplication scanning.  Have all my machines, and my parents and sister backing up to it.  Pretty cheap for that.  But you can't stream off of it like you could Bitcasa.  I'm hoping they will add that feature, but honestly I've heard it was one of the features that attracted the wrong kind of crowd to Bitcasa.  IMHO best for cloud backup, but need something else for cloud storage.