This little consulting company made me a lot of money solving other people’s PC, network and software issues until I decided I needed a change of pace. In 2010 I sold a very profitable computer consulting company I started in 1994 upon leaving the employ of Symantec (where I was Beta Administrator for Time Line 6). My tasks were to build the circuits we needed and interface the entire system. I was on the team that built the very first computerized house in Tiburon, California in 1983.
I owned and operated several technology companies over nearly 40 years, including AudioCraft Engineering in Marin County, which serviced the Pro Audio gear for studios and musicians up and down the West Coast. I designed and built numerous Recording Studios in Northern California, including MC Hammer’s in the early 90s – and Metallica’s favorite rehearsal studio in the early 80s. I was a Recording Engineer for Motown Records and worked in almost every studio on the West Coast. I have spent most of my life in technology.
When it is actually syncing, it uses all the bandwidth of my fairly fast UVerse pipe and I have to pause Bitcasa Sync in order to stream video or watch something on YouTube on any computer or TV on the network. It will NOT close on command either from it’s own menu or via Activity Monitor.
I routinely have to pause the sync process, then Force Quit Bitcasa in order to free up other running applications. Both Aperture and Photoshop, which I use constantly, become unresponsive on launch or import / File Open when Bitcasa is loaded. However, it still does not handle threads or process priorities correctly. Since replacing Bitcasa 1207 with build 1.3 1217, it no longer crashes on load. Chris was very helpful and my assessment of their support based on this single sampling is excellent. I then contacted Bitcasa support via online chat and began the laborious process of clearing the Bitcasa cache (this can take hours) and downloading the newest build with instructions for removing the current version and replacing it. I immediately loaded Activity Monitor and found Bitcasa’s CPU usage was at 1,420 % – over One Thousand Percent ?!?!?!?!?! I immediately executed a Force Quit of Bitcasa, as it would not close on it’s own. I noticed the temperature monitor on my display showed my computer running at 61 degrees C. The next day when I booted the computer, Bitcasa was crashing on load and generating error messages to accompany this activity. It would not shut down on it’s own and I had to initiate a Force Quit command to unload it from memory. On August first, when I was finished with the computer for the night, I closed all running apps as I normally do before shut-down and tried to close Bitcasa. I let the computer run around the clock for 3 days to get the queued material synced. I immediately noticed a massive degradation in performance. I added a few more folders that I wanted mirrored and let it run. This is a small portion of the data I need mirrored, as I have several Terabytes of data stored on my system. The installation went smoothly and it immediately identified the primary data folders on my boot drive and began backing them up. In late July of 2013 I downloaded and installed the Bitcasa app (version 1207). I had read the reviews and a lot of forum posts regarding problems with the app, but results seemed to have been improving over the last year, so I decided to give it a try. Bitcasa has been making news with their incredible offer of infinite storage for only $100 per year. Recently I have been searching for cloud-based backup for my massive image library.