Copy.com

» see copy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The offer was fifteen gigabytes free, and another five for every person you talked into signing up, and five for them too. In 2013 that beat what Dropbox gave you and what Google gave you, and it worked the way these things always work. A referral link in a forum signature, then the same link at the bottom of somebody's email, and everybody's quota climbing on everybody else's account.

Copy went public on 20 February 2013. Barracuda Networks built it on the storage it was already running underneath its backup appliances, which is to say the infrastructure existed before the product did. Barracuda sold spam filters and firewalls to companies. Copy was the consumer face of that same hardware, and CudaDrive was the identical service with a business invoice attached to it. Inside ninety days the thing was approaching half a million users.

The interesting part was never the free space. Copy divided the cost of a shared folder between the accounts in it. A five gigabyte folder shared between two people counted as two and a half against each of them. Dropbox billed the whole folder to everyone in it, which meant a large shared folder could lock a free account out of its own storage. Copy called it fair sharing, it was the sensible way to do the arithmetic, and no competitor ever adopted it.

By 2013 the question of where files live had already been settled, at least in my working life. Sync was a solved problem with two winners and a habit built on top of them, and what a late entrant could offer was more room, which is a reason to open an account and not a reason to move anything into it. I was an engineer with a job by then, and the files that mattered lived in a repository rather than a folder. Copy showed up at the point in a market's life where generous is the only pitch left.

~ the case file ~

~ the referral math ~

A referral scheme of this kind is a bet that the storage you hand out costs less than the person is worth. Dropbox made that bet and won it. Copy made a larger version of the same bet without the thing that made Dropbox's version work, which was that people had already put their files there and were not going to move them. Free space attracts people who want free space. Somebody who arrived for fifteen gigabytes will leave for twenty.

Barracuda kept raising it anyway. Five gigabytes at launch, fifteen by May 2013, then promotional deals that pushed individual accounts into the hundreds. There are people who ended up holding terabytes on Copy without ever paying a cent, which is an excellent way to sit at the top of a comparison table and a poor way to build something that pays for itself.

~ what barracuda actually wanted ~

The notice went out on 2 February 2016 and gave 1 May as the end for both Copy and CudaDrive. Rod Mathews, who ran the storage business, said the focus was shifting to backup and data protection, which is the part of the market that sends invoices to companies with procurement departments. Users got three months and a partnership with Mover to shovel their files into OneDrive.

Three months is a decent notice period. It is also long enough to work out that nothing you kept there was irreplaceable, because a service you joined for the free gigabytes does not end up holding the files you care about. The farewell page thanks the millions of users who used the service "over the years", and the years in question number three. The domain answers as cahoots.com now, some other company that wanted a short name.

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