Image by Emil Indricău used under Creative Commons License
Bitcasa was a digital fairy tale story. when most cloud providers were charging $10 a month for 100 GB of storage, Bitcasa shook up the model by offering unlimited online cloud storage for on $99 a year (early subscribers were offered a $79 deal).
They explained that this "magic" was possible because of their deep-deduplication technology which worked even though they claim all data is encrypted before being uploaded.
Fast forward to 2014 and the company made enemies when it announced the end of its unlimited storage plans forcing customers to move to a more expensive (less storage) solution or lose their files. This was doubly troubling since their initial pitch was to use their service to offload files from your computer to free up space. This means many users likely don't have local backup copies of their data.
Some very angry customers have filed a class action lawsuit against Bitcasa for alleged brief of contract. The court hearing the case has granted a temporary restraining order forcing the double crossing cloud provider to save all customer files at least until November 20.
Funny enough, on November 15th, I received this email from Bitcasa
