BingoNewbies

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Contents

Introduction

The Bingo service is networked storage accessed via the WebDAV protocol.

Current Bingo Plans
Plan Name Yearly Price Storage Space Monthly Bandwidth
Nano $19 10GB Unlimited
Mini $29 15GB Unlimited
Small $49 25GB Unlimited
Medium $99 50GB Unlimited
Large $199 100GB Unlimited

WebDAV

Bingo storage space is accessed through the WebDav protocol. Typically a user will mount the bingo account as a disk using native OS WebDAV support or one of the commercial applications mentioned below. Using this method, every application becomes "network aware."

Implementation Details

The Bingo service is hosted on Sun Fire X4500 "Thumpers" running OpenSolaris and the ZFS file system.

The Public Folder

Anything placed in the public folder is accessible via http without a password. However, the directories are not browseable. Anything not placed in the public folder is password protected.

Comparison with Strongspace

Strongspace uses a secure, encrypted protocol for file access, the SSH protocol (via SFTP), and encrypts the files stored on Strongspace with a strong block cipher (Blowfish).

Bingo gives you much more storage per dollar, but uses WebDAV and does not encrypt the files on the Bingo server. (WebDAV can be accessed over https for more secure communications.)

Mounting as a drive letter under XP

If you don't have a product like WebDrive installed (see below), you can still mount your Bingo account as a drive letter under Windows XP by issuing the following command on the command line:

net use i: "http://yourlogin.bingodisk.com/bingo" /User:Username Password

Change i: to the drive letter you want to mount your Bingo space to.

Problems

Although WebDAV is built in to most modern operating systems, many report problems with native WebDAV under both Microsoft's Windows XP and Apple's OS X. Commercial software such as South River Technology's WebDrive (Windows) or Panic's Transmit and Interarchy (Mac) is often used to improve WebDAV support.

Another drawback inherent to any online storage is that upload speeds are often capped far below that of downloads, so that initial uploads can be quite lengthy (on the order of days). This makes synchronization software important to use for subsequent uploads. Popular choices include SyncBack or SyncBackSE for Windows.

Other Uses

Some mac users report success with using SuperDuper! on OS X to create a sparse disk image on a local drive which is then uploaded to Bingo.