![]() Unlike most online-storage services, Wuala offers no password reminder. Your password serves as the encryption key for your private files, which you alone can retrieve-even Caleido employees can't. It does require somewhat more RAM than the purely browser-based SkyDrive, though navigation is quicker than with the Microsoft service, since you don't have to wait for page loads.Īnyone can see Wuala's publicly shared World folder without creating an account, but to take advantage of the service's benefits, you need to sign up. Wuala does not, however, run within your browser-it's a separate Java application. ![]() Assuming you've got that, you just click on the Start button on the wua.la home page to launch the Java app. Wuala requires no download, but you'll need to have Sun's Java runtime installed. AOL's ill-fated Xdrive, with its Adobe AIR desktop client, resembles Wuala even more, but that service is being discontinued. But SkyDrive gives you 5GB of free storage, compared with the mere 1GB Wuala offers gratis. The new service, whose Web site is located at wua.la, competes directly with Freedrive and Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive, which also have public, shared, and private online folders. Though this means that your files may be stored on strangers' PCs, the files are encrypted and sliced up so that a whole file won't be on any single user's system. This beta service's publicly shared media folders resemble what you'd find in a peer-to-peer file-sharing service, as does the option to add more storage to your account by volunteering part of your hard drive to the service's storage grid, thereby saving the company bandwidth costs. Istvan Lam, CEO of Tresorit, has also written an interesting blog post detailing a little history of Wuala and the current consumer landscape in secure cloud storage.Wuala gives online storage a new spin with peer-to-peer storage-grid technology and a Java-based Web application with community features. The startup has even developed a tool to help Wuala users transition to its service. Interestingly, the company is also recommending another cloud storage startup with an emphasis on security: Swiss-Hungarian startup Tresorit, which claims to one-up the likes of Dropbox and Box in terms of security and privacy because, similar to Wuala, it employs end-to-end encryption, meaning that you - and only you - have the “keys” needed to access your files. The immediate advice to Wuala users is to back up their data stored on the service to a PC, Mac or another cloud storage offering, somewhat ironic considering that the idea of taking out a Wuala account in the first place is that you’d no longer need to worry about backups. ![]() Effective Sunday, 15 November 2015, the Wuala cloud service will terminate. Full account service will continue through 30 September 2015, at which point all active accounts will shift to read-only mode. In a blog post to customers, Wuala has just announced that it is to shut down.Įffective as of today, you will no longer be able to purchase storage or renew existing accounts. Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie, said that the partnership would lead LaCie to transform from a hardware manufacturer to a “digital storage provider”. In fact, at the time the two companies talked up the deal as a “merger” rather than one acquiring the other. A traditional hardware storage maker picking up an expert in cloud storage software. Despite exiting pretty early instead of scaling to become a leader in the space (in then somewhat typical European style), the deal made a lot of sense. Back in 2009, hardware storage company LaCie acquired Wualu, a Zurich-based startup and pioneer in peer-to-peer cloud storage.
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