Bitcasa Comes Out of Beta with Infinite Cloud Storage and Client-Side Encryption

Bitcasa, one of the many companies offering cloud storage, is going out of a rather lengthy beta. Bitcasa's selling point is infinite storage, that is, for a fixed fee users get to upload as many files as they need. There are other companies offering cheap storage, the newly launched Mega offers 50 GB for free, but no one is promising infinite storage.

The price is quite interesting as well, you get the full service for just $10, €7.39 a month or $99, €73.20 per year if you pay it all at once. What's more, in February, Bitcasa is running a special price which means you can get it on a year's subscription for just $69, €51.

You can sign up for free and use the service as is without paying anything, at least for a while. Among Bitcasa's other selling points, besides infinite storage, is client-side encryption, like the recently launched Mega.

However, unlike Bitcasa also uses file deduplication, i.e. it only stores one copy of any file no matter how many users have it. Normally, with client-side encryption, identical files encrypted with different keys would create completely different encrypted files.

Bitcasa though generates the client-side keys based on the files themselves, so identical files will result in identical keys. When those files are encrypted by different users with the same key, the resulting files will, quite obviously, be identical as well.

Bitcasa is available on just about every platform, as is the norm for cloud storage providers, there's a Windows and Mac client, though a Linux version is still in the works, there's a web version and mobile apps for iOS, Android and even a Chrome app version, with Firefox and Safari on the way.

Since the service has been in beta for so long, it's now more than ready for users and comes with tested features and quite a lot of apps, again, unlike Mega which only offers a web version usable just with Chrome.