Wuala
Wuala is a secure cloud storage, made in Switzerland. As the Swiss knife of cloud storage, it covers all the essential needs for professional and personal use: with Wuala, you can store your files securely online, share them with select others, access them from anywhere, setup...
Cost / License
- Paid
- Proprietary
Application type
EUAlerts
- Discontinued
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- iPad
The service will be shutdown on 15 November 2015.
Features
- Folder Sync
Tags
- Backup
- dropbox
Wuala News & Activities
Recent activities
What is Wuala?
Wuala is a secure cloud storage, made in Switzerland. As the Swiss knife of cloud storage, it covers all the essential needs for professional and personal use: with Wuala, you can store your files securely online, share them with select others, access them from anywhere, setup automatic backups of your local data, or synchronize whole folders to the cloud. Wuala employs client-side-encryption to achieve a unique level of security. All data is encrypted locally, before it is uploaded. Your password never leaves your computer. Nobody - not even we as storage provider - can access your data without your authorization. Wuala's data centers are all located in Europe (Switzerland, Germany, France).
Wuala exists since 2007 and is operated and developed by LaCie AG in Zurich. LaCie is a French manufacturer of well-designed external storage devices. Wuala joined LaCie in March 2009, sharing the vision of advancing the world of data storage.
Wuala information
Developed by
LaCie Licensing
Proprietary and Commercial product.Alternatives
78 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
I've been a Wuala user from the beginning and I used to be very satisfied but things have changed. Wuala claims to be very secure and they gave me that feeling, especially after having read about their implementation. But security is as strong as the password. And a password alone is really weak.
I've sent them a suggestion to implement something like a keyfile like Keepass does or a two-factor login system because passwords could easily get keylogged. But they were not interested (at the moment) because "they didn't see the need for it" because they never noticed anyone getting keylogged (in whatever way they can check that). Also their auto-login feature for in their app is also insecure, the pin code doesn't improve much. But to using the app is avoidable.
The next biggest problem is that they have proven to be very unreliable for storage on the long term. They recently wanted to perform an update to their filesystem and forced users to download a part of their files and re-upload them. I've tried to do that multiple times of different days but the feature didn't work properly so I never managed to download all my files, so I've lost an unknown number of them! And what about users that use their service but rarely log in??
Also, you can't even share files with a custom password! Secure link sharing they call it, don't let me laugh!
Wuala offeres very useful features like streaming, cross-platform compatibility, group sharing, but they should really do something about their nr. 1 selling point!!!
As of end of 2015 it will be shut down unfortunatelly. What a shame.
At its users are being pushed onto
Tresorit : https://tresorit.com/business/wuala-alternative
Servers offering encrypted data, only you can access (lose pass, lose everything), which happens to be located in Switzerland where privacy laws are strict and pro towards the people? Gives a new meaning to "offshore data havens" a new meaning. Hands down the best for privacy.
Welp, the unthinkable just happened:
https://forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2231
Time to find a alternative to Wuala, or just rent a VPS with a fast upload/download and lots of storage space.
So it appears that trading storage won't be possible after next week. As that is pretty much the only reason I have for staying with Wuala I need to find another backup service with similar "pricing".
In fact, I wonder why there isn't an open source version of this. Peer-to-peer technologies seem to be made for this kind of an application...
Another cool feature of sharing disk for getting space: if you leave your computer off, your space decreases (obviously), but your data is not erased, even if your space becomes too small for it, and it's always readable. The only thing that changes is that you cannot add anything until you get back to having some free space left. I don't know how long this can be, but on the site they claim they will never erase your data. So it's not a problem if you switch off your machine for a long time, of course you need to wait an equally long time when you switch it on again, in order to get back to your usual disk space. Of course you can immediately share a bigger portion of your disk instead, and decrease it with time.
As an example, I spent one month away from my desktop, which was left off, and my space went down to about 20 G, with 43G of saved data!
Note that this is a very useful feature but you should not abuse it, as if everyone did so the performance would eventually decrease for all users.. a nice example of "tragedy of commons".
None of this applies anymore, either pay or leave.
Small correction about the official description for Wuala at this site: The backup and sync features are no longer "limited". They've been made freely available. You can do real backups, or you can sync folders, and it need not be just one special folder (like with Dropbox). You also do not need to sync your sync folders to all devices which have Wuala installed, but you can still access all of your files on those devices from the file manager as if it were a local drive (it just downloads them as you use them, instead of all at once with sync) and/or you can use their Java frontend either from your PC or from their website to access all of your files, whether they are in sync folders or not.
Traded space takes the percentage of online time that you have multiplied by the amount of HD space you set aside. At the time of this writing, you are allowed 100GB per computer, but you can use multiple computers. I'm online about 75% of the time, that is, I run the local Wuala client about that much every day (including all night, of course), and I have 100GB set aside. It's quite simple. So, right now, I really do have about 75GB of cloud storage for free. I give them space to use, and they give me space to use, with impressive features and peace of mind thrown in. Sounds fair to me.