Cloud storage – Infinite storage for 10 $ a month

Mum, what’s that white fluffy thing in the sky?
-Well dear, this is where all your memories are stored.
-Huh?

People tend to accumulate things throughout their lives. Have you ever wanted to throw away a seldom-used object, but ended up keeping it because you believe it could be useful one day? But when you actually need that particular object, it is impossible to find because you have kept way to many potentially useful objects spread all around the house.

Computer usage is very similar to this first anecdote. We are accumulating gigabytes of music, documents and movies  without counting, but there comes a day when the internal hard disk refuses to store more data because they are simply full. That is when people buy external hard disks to store even more data! From the floppy disk, to CD and DVDs, from the zip disk to memory cards and USB flash drives, we have been craving for more and more storage space.

Tablet pcs, Mac book Airs and notebooks have already given up on CDs and DvDs: 4.7GB on a DVD compared to current USB sticks have no chances to survive. USB has a much higher transfer rate and can contain a lot more data. Blu-ray might keep the medium functional for a bit longer, but we are definitely heading to a new era of storage, a storage that is available everywhere in the world, whenever you need it, with much bigger storage space for home users: Cloud storage.

I will not go into a detailed explanation about how cloud storage works, but this should help you;).

According to Gizmodo, The new Itunes 10.5 was released earlier this evening announcing new compatibility with the brand new Icloud providing 5GB of free storage.

Furthermore and more interesting is the announcement of an unlimited cloud storage for 10$ per month [1]: Bitcasa. What is interesting about Bitcasa is that they estimate that 60 % of people’s data are duplicated elsewhere.

This service thus “uses a de-duplication algorithm along with compression technology to reduce the amount of storage space needed for each user. The upshot being that if two users have an identical file, the service only keeps one copy and makes it available to both users.”[2]

To be honest I am not sure how they can provide ‘an infinite’ storage space, but I decided to sign up for the beta and this is the page I received.

If this is true then I will leave the link here and promise to write about it as soon as I get to try it.

[2] Source for quote: Extremetech