Cloud mega-uploads aren't easy

::shrugs:: Cloud storage is a tired, meaningless meme.

The marketards don't seem to understand the difference between "bandwidth" and "latency" ... see this post.

As a side note, see this post.

The thought of an unencrypted 1TB+ CSV file...it brings shivers to anyone who cares for their data.

Teething problems, or something worse?

The premise of "cloud" is that it'll be wonderful once we're all using it. It's the getting started that's lacking. This does seem to be a bit of an oversight on the pushy vendors' parts. It also spells doom for the idea of bailing out later on, ie getting all that data back out.

So you decided to "go cloud". Did you even think about the getting data in, much less the getting data back out issues? And I don't mean on just the technical level; there'll be an entrepeneur for that.

Bitcasa?

Actually, Bitcasa's offering is extremely good. It has features and advantages that none of the other similar services (Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive) offer:

1) You can "cloudify" any folder transparently (including removable media and network shares).

2) You can cache any amount of data locally (managed automatically) up to the amount of free space on the local machine. Actual data volume in cloudified folders is unlimited.

3) It's all you can eat (but if you're going to abuse it you're going to need a LOT of internet bandwidth.

Having had a quick play with it, it is quite awesome. There are a couple of limitations:

1) No linux client. Tthis makes it mostly useless to me - having to run Windows in a VM to keep my folders in sync is a bit too much of a requirement. It also makes it less easy to keep the data encrypted (surely no sane person would keep their data in the cloud unencrypted?) and versioned (I have to stack cryptfs and copyfs on top, and then cloudify the bottom layer).

2) No Android client.

The lack of Linux and Android support makes it not yet ready to replace Dropbox for me. Once those two platforms are supported, I'll be sold.

The only concern is how they plan to monetize it - all you can eat is a lot of disks to be maintaining without revenues. Without that, the service might just disappear with little or no warning, taking all the data with it. Even if there is reasonable warning, how much of a run on local disk supplies is it going to cause, and how long is downloading, say, 10TB going to take (i.e. how much of a warning are you going to need)?

DVDs

Amazon's service works well for multi-terabytes, but I'd be interested in something that would work for smaller uploads, e.g. a single DVD. I could burn a DVD and walk to the postbox much more quickly than uploading the same data.

Legacy data

I suspect the author of this piece isn't fully buying into the "new world order". Everything you do from now on will be stored in the cloud and manipulated by scraping your greasy fingers around on the tiny screen of your phone. This is the way of the future.

Anything else you did before is "legacy", and Microsoft doesn't give a shit about it.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

Try importing to Google Apps

We had the same problem moving our data to Google Apps. At least Amazon provides (for a large fee) the ability to ship them drives. Uploading 100's of Gigs of data to Google proved impossible via their web software. Luckily, we discovered is a third party app, Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com, that does reliable migration of huge data sets to Google Drive.

The cost of migrating data will provide a new vendor lock-in, just like Microsoft locked us in with Office file formats.Once they have all your data, you're stuck.