14 DAY TRIAL // Bitcasa, the cloud storage startup that once promised to allow you to store an infinite number of files, has announced that it will no longer be supporting… infinite storage.
Yes, that’s right. The one thing that made Bitcasa different from the rest will no longer be available.
“While our Infinite offering was one of our early value propositions, we have since found that only a small percentage of people use it (only 0.5 percent of our accounts require more than 1TB, and less than 0.1 percent require more than 10TB),” the company explained.
They go on to say that, while they tried to make their vision of infinite work, the low demand, combined with the growing number of suspected abusers, made this plan not viable for the business. The tight privacy levels the company has set in place have made it impossible to enforce the Acceptable Use policy, since they can only see how much data is stored on a certain account. For some customers, they note, is at a level that seems impossible for individual usage.
More important, however, is that everyone will have to migrate their data within the next three weeks. That’s because over the past year Bitcasa has worked to upgrade the backend storage infrastructure to be faster, more stable, and more scalable.
“To keep our zero-knowledge encryption in place for your account, you will need to transfer your account and all your data over to the new Bitcasa system,” the company explains.
Transfer your data, transfer your plan
While the experience should be pretty painless for those with Free, Premium, and Pro plans, the company apologizes for the inconvenience. The current apps are no longer compatible with the new storage system and everyone will have to download the new Bitcasa apps.
People have until November 15, 2014 to migrate all data. Anything that gets left behind, both accounts and data, will be deleted on November 16, 2014.
Users of the Infinite plan have to transfer to the 1TB Premium plan or the new 10TB Pro plan to continue using the service. The company has set in place an easy method to do so, and has even provided intuitive guides to walk people through the process.
Bitcasa promises to continue adding new features in the coming year, and the developers are pretty confident in the value that the new platform and infrastructure will bring to the game as the customer base continues growing.
You can download the new Bitcasa apps for Windows and Mac from Softpedia.