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Wuala is an online storage service from LaCie, a company better known for its external hard disks and DVD writers. While most of its competitors have separate services for backup and general purpose online storage and file sharing, Wuala is designed for both.
You can get a basic service with 1GB storage for free, but to get all the features you’ll need to pay. We tested the cheapest plan, which is €19 a year for 10GB storage. If you need more room, you can either pay more or, unusually, trade free hard disk space on your computer for more online storage. You need to be online for at least four hours a day to take advantage of this, and you can set the amount you want to share through Wuala. The amount of online storage you get back for free is the amount of disk space you’ve shared multiplied by the time you are online. Four hours is 17% of a day, so if you shared 100GB hard disk space for the minimum time you’d get 17GB online storage for free.
You can upload and download files to your online storage using either the Wuala program or Windows Explorer, but the Explorer integration still requires the program to be installed. There’s no web interface to access your files – you have to install a Java app, which works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and the iPhone. If you make a change to a file, the entire file must be uploaded again, rather than just a small segment, which would be annoying on very large files such as videos.
The program is also used to pick files for synchronising. Unlike a backed up file which is only stored on one computer and online, a synchronised file can be stored on multiple computers as well as online and changes made on one computer are automatically reflected in the other copies. It’s a subtle distinction that isn’t well explained in Wuala’s documentation. Unfortunately versioning isn’t available for synchronised files, only on backed up files. Versioning is a useful feature that allows you to revert to a previous version of a file in case you make a change you wish you hadn’t.
If you upload lots of files to Wuala, you can set a limit as to how much of them are automatically cached onto your hard disk so they can still be accessed even if you don’t have an internet connection. You can also throttle the speed of uploads if you need to use your internet connection for other tasks.
The program can also be used to share stored files with friends and colleagues, avoiding the need for large email attachments clogging up email servers and inboxes. You can simply email them a link as needed, or import contacts from your email or Facebook contact lists and set which files and folders they can access. Sadly, non-Wuala members are stuck with a crude web page that can’t download folders with a single click – the files inside have to be downloaded one-by-one.
Unfortunately the Wuala software is in beta, a fact that isn’t pointed out when you sign up. The application is slightly buggy. On a residential ADSL connection, there were often inexplicable delays before uploads started. When attempting to access files in the Shopper offices, we often had trouble accessing the service at all due to our company firewall – a problem not experienced with other online storage services.
We wanted to like Wuala, but it’s let down by the lack of a web interface for your backups and the unnecessary distinction between backing up and synchronisation. We’d rather use the simpler Dropbox for general-purpose online storage and Livedrive for backup.
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Price | £17 |
| Details | www.wuala.com |
| Rating | *** |
