No more setting aside time
to log in to all of your accounts and manually backup your data!
Overall Rating
WuaLa is a extremely innovative social online storage and sharing via friends and groups service that offers a 1 GB no cost account. For additional storage space you can either trade unused local disk space in lieu of more online storage (e.G., trade 50 GBs on your computer to get up to 50 GBs of online storage), or purchase additional storage (per year: $25/10 GB, $95/50 GB, $160/100 GB, $630/500 GB, $1000/1 TB). Monthly bandwidth and document size is boundless and desktop clients are provided for Windows, Mac, and Linux for painless drag-and-drop uploading. One major drawback is customer support is only provided through email at this point.
|
|
Wuala recently announced the addition of some supplementary key features: Backup and file restoration. The new features came just in time to mark their first anniversary of Wuala, which currently has users storing and sharing well over 75 million files. The new backup feature enables Wuala users to indicate a folder from a local hard drive to automatically be backed up to Wuala’s secure online storage. Data backup is complemented by the document restore feature that allows users to access over written or deleted files from a prior date and restore them (versioning), protecting the user from unfortunate accidental deletions. The file restore and backup features perform together to enable a user to access a local folder as it was at any desired point in time. |
“Backup has long been a feature requested by our users, and we are happy to finally release it”, says Dominik 
Grolimund, Co-Founder of Wuala. “Since incorporating this capability, it has become convenient to my everyday life. Currently, I use it to save my extensive photo collection and important documents on Wuala. That way, if my computer crashes, I’ll have a complete backup of these files. Better yet, I know can access them from any computer that has an Internet connection.”
There are a duo of things that set Wua.La apart from Allpeers and the other social online storage services, with the distributed storage element being the most obvious. Sharing files on Wua.La automatically dictates uploading them to the network, the upside of this being that your contacts can download your documents even when you are not online.
Every user starts of with 1GB of online storage that is initially provided by the company’s servers. You can get extra storage space for sharing some gratis gigabytes of your own hard disk, but WuaLa doesn’t just take anyone. You need be able to accept incoming connections as well as have your client online for at least five or so hours per day to be acknowledged as a node for their distributed storage system. Keeping the client online longer will accumulate you some extra credits. For instance if you provide 10GB of your local storage space and you are online 70% of the time, you get 7GB of additional online storage.
Wuala’s rapid growth is not simply attributed to its ease of use, but users’ confidence in its unique way of protecting their privacy. All documents stored in Wuala are securly encrypted on the user’s workstation before they are stored online. Users can then set preferences for allowing the public, their friend network, or individuals access to their folders. Since the user’s password never leaves the workstation no one can decrypt their confidential documents.
“I love the idea of time travel to change or restore a file. If you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, it’s easy to restore it to a previous version. Together with the automatic mirroring of local folders, this is a step towards making Wuala a more useful tool for managing your personal data,”said Luzius Meisser, Co-Founder of Wuala.
Users that aspire to take advantage of the pristine data backup and restore features must be converted into Pro users. Pro status is accessible to users who have bought supplementary online storage or have traded local storage for online storage. In stark contrast to other data online backup and storage solutions, Wuala is based on grid storage space where everyone with a PC that is routinely connected to the Internet can opt to donate local hard drive space in exchange for additional storage on the grid (sounds like the Matrix to us) thus increasing their online storage and thus opting to become a part of the growing grid network behind Wuala.
Overall we like WuaLa and envision a bright future this type of grid/file sharing storage. Really taking Napster to a new level.
How Wua.La Works Videos: