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al3d/bitcasa.md

Last active September 8, 2015 14:27
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How to download all your Bitcasa Drive files using rsync
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bitcasa.md

After over a year trying to download many GBs of files from my Bitcasa drive I was losing my mind. It rarely worked, and it broke when trying to download a corrupt file (which Bitcasa had corrupted. There were many corrupt files)

Following several support requests that didn't help, I received one that helped. I'm publishing this to help others

The following is part of an email from their technical support in September 2015

To automate your download, you can use RSYNC in Terminal. Please confirm Drive has finished loading your data before starting RSYNC. It will say "All items are up to date" in the Bitcasa menu.

Here's a tutorial: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/rsync-guide.html

Open Terminal from Spotlight and type the following:

rsync -aPu <drag and drop the folder from the Bitcasa Drive here> <drag and drop the folder on your computer you want to put the data into here>

Hit Enter.

RSYNC will check and download your files automatically into the folder you designated on your computer. If it comes across problem files, it will check them a few times before moving on to the next file. Depending on the # of files and size of data you have, it may take awhile to finish. It's automated so you can set it and come back later to check it. Just make sure you have an active internet connection and disable your computer from going to sleep.

The "<>" are there for example, don't type them. Just drag and drop the folder.

Alternatively you don't need to drag and drop. On a mac, the bitcasa drive is loaded to the /Volumes directory, so you can download your entire drive to your desktop by using something similar to the following command:

rsync -aPu /Volumes/Bitcasa\ Drive/ ~/Desktop/BitcasaFiles

A few additional points

  • It will take a while to download and you will see a lot of activity in the window. I had a lot of files corrupted by bitcasa and they failed to download.

  • I had given up caring about those individual corrupt files (I just wanted to get the majority of files off the service), and using this method skips those corrupt files.

  • If you have large files and many folders, it may be smarter to run the rsync command individually on your subfolders e.g.

      rsync -aPu /Volumes/Bitcasa\ Drive/<subdir1> ~/Desktop/Bitcasa/<subdir1>
  rsync -aPu /Volumes/Bitcasa\ Drive/<subdir2> ~/Desktop/Bitcasa/<subdir2>

I hope this helps whoever needs it.

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