Wuala, the social online storage
Ready for online storage the cloud way? Online storage is coming quickly, superseding traditional technologies and methods such as external hard-drives, USB flash drives, and tedious email attachments. Why? Because it makes life easier.
Wuala does it differently, and it seems to be gaining ground. Wuala allows you to securely store and back up files online and access them from anywhere. It is a shared environment meaning you can collect files within groups or share them to anyone in the Wuala network you would like. Discovery is interesting, Wuala allows you to browse through millions of files and discover cool stuff like images, videos and much more.
The technology behind Wuala has been researched and developed at ETG Zyrich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
The idea with Wuala is you start with 1GB of online storage provided by the site. If you want more you have some options, you can buy more storage, or, you have the option to trade space from your hard disk for online storage.
Yes you read that correctly, you can trade local storage for online storage capability.
When trading, the idea is not to give you more storage in total, apart from the 1GB you start with, but to change the quality of your storage. The idea is to give you accessibility to your online storage from anywhere, anytime, even if your local machine is offline.
Your skepticism may be the security and privacy offered by Wuala. Wuala claims they encrypt all files on your computer before they are stored online. You have the options of who has access to the files and since your password never leaves your computer no one else gets to see private files.
Dre’s Thoughts
Everyone knows I am a proponent of cloud services and technologies, this is a great move towards minimizing the need for large storage capability on your local machine. I will be testing out Wuala and writing a follow up article down the road.
My biggest area of concern is the potential legalities behind illegal material that may or may not traverse your local storage from other users when trading in local storage for online capability.
At the end of the day, I really don’t want illegal data floating around my machine and that may be a major deterrent for various segments to use these for ever advancing technologies.
All in all, I think this is a great product to try out and engage with to see how it truly functions.
Wuala offers an API that may be useful for you. Their technology is based on various open source projects and their servers are powered with 100% green energy.
