Wuala Launches P2P Cloud Storage Solution
Wuala puts a new twist on cloud storage. While typical cloud storage services move your data onto servers managed by the provider, Wuala also uses disk space on other members' computers. Files are encrypted on the user's own machine and the chopped up into little pieces and uploaded to Wuala's servers, as well as numerous other users' computers (Wuala calls this 'social grid storage') to provide a redundant storage solution. Wuala's local client is written in Java and runs on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
Share It
While Wuala will happily sell you additional storage space (from $25 a year for 10GB to $1000 for 1TB), you can also trade your own local disk space for cloud storage space. If you share 5GB of space on your local drive, you will get an additional 5GB of online storage. Given how cheap hard disks have become, this seems like a fair trade-off. Users who share their local hard disk space can also turn off advertising on Wuala.
Wuala's client basically looks like a local folder and you can decide if you want to share any of your files stored on Wuala with either your friends or a group of users.
Encryption: The Good and the Bad
Even with the strong encryption Wuala uses, though, the fact that some information is going to be stored on machines outside of even Wuala's control is not going to sit well with a lot of people. While most private users can probably live with these risks (which are inherent in any cloud storage solution), businesses will probably stay very far away from Wuala.
There is also the question of how people will use Wuala - after all, the service provides almost unlimited and strongly encrypted storage. As Wuala has little control over what is shared on the network, Wuala might turn out to be a haven for rather unsavory activities. But then, the same can probably be said for most other cloud storage services as well.
Where's the Money?
Wuala expects to monetize its service through advertising and in the German and Swiss market, where Wuala is based, they have also partnered with a photo printing service that will allow Wuala users to order prints of shared photos right from within Wuala. Besides this, Wuala is also selling storage space beyond the 1GB that every user who doesn't share disk space gets by default.The cloud storage market is highly competitive, but so far, no clear front-runner has emerged. Wuala's competitors include Box.net, Dropbox, Mozy, as well as Apple's Mobile Me and Microsoft's various online storage services, including SkyDrive and Mesh. There are also various software solutions to make backing up to Amazon's S3 more consumer friendly. All of these have different business models and feature sets, but Wuala's simplicity and P2P sharing approach will make it very competitive.
Comments
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Wuala is NOT your typical online storage. My take on this new new thing ;) http://bit.ly/35P7Wj
Posted by: Yung-Hui Lim
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August 14, 2008 2:29 AM
I am so checking this service out very interested.I am a premium user of Yousendit so this could be the way forward for me.Cheaper too!
Posted by: Roger Kondrat
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August 14, 2008 2:29 AM
Does this solution make cloud storage more or less susceptible to outage? What happens if one of the users in the grid goes down?
Posted by: David Young
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August 14, 2008 2:40 AM
SteekR (http://www.steekr.com) is also a competitor to consider
Posted by: JM | August 14, 2008 2:57 AM
This is a pretty good summary of the Wuala software, but the more important thing is the technology.
The method for distributing files is based on an improved P2P method similar to BitTorrent, so that when anyone downloads or uploads it is being stored on many different systems based on transfer speed and other factors.
To make sure each file is seeded properly, quotas and trading storage space becomes important. Your article states that trading 5 GB will gain 5GB of space, but actually you will get your traded space * online uptime. This is a percentage, starting at around 10% and usually changing at most by 3% every day. So if you share 5 GB and are online 100% of the time, you will get 5 GB, but if you are only online 50%, you would get 2.5 GB.
Regarding file security, the encryption is legitimate from my understanding, so there *should* not be any problems.
For businesses or high security use, its possible to combine Wuala with your own encryption by sharing encrypted files or using filesystem encryption with the Wuala filesystem integration (NFS).
In these cases though, the performance is more an issue than security, because if you have a large business-oriented budget, then it can be more effective to pay for a file hosting service.
For lots of home users and enthusiasts, Wuala is able to provide some reliable storage, and let you share resources (storage space and online time) to ease file sharing, among friends or groups as well as publicly.
In some ways the closest thing to this currently is BitLet, a Java BitTorrent client and .torrent generator, and they are great things for ReadWriteWeb to cover since they both help with obtaining and distributing file data :)
Posted by: mike | August 14, 2008 10:37 AM
I think the concerns about lack of safety that may be an obstacle for businesses are not particularly important for Wuala since they seem to be focused more on individual users sharing their private information like photos. I don't think it is wise for any business to rely on any third-party online service for storage, really.
Posted by: Svetlana Gladkova
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August 15, 2008 1:07 AM
Mike: there's also Tahoe/AllMyData http://www.allmydata.com/
I would note that in at least one respect Tahoe is better than Wuala; as it is GPL*, the crypto code can be inspected. I dunno about you, but I simply can't even consider storing my personal files on a public network whose crypto I can't trust.
* http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe
Posted by: gwern | August 15, 2008 6:00 AM
Gwern: Tahoe is another exciting piece of software, and for anyone that is interested, well worth checking out.
But for many users, trying to explain how to check dependencies and run make will get a "huh?" sort of response :D
Open source / GPL is very important, and I do hope Wuala decides to move in that direction. For files requiring absolute security, I'd recommend using your own preferred crypto on top of Wuala - just PGP encrypt the file before uploading.
For casual use, there is no reason to think their crypto is any less reliable than other closed-source applications.
Posted by: mike | August 15, 2008 10:14 PM
I won't be using Wuala for the reasons you mentioned in the article. I have some redundancy in my backup process which included network attached storage (TimeCapsule and FreeNAS), Mozy (for profile data), MobileMe , and Amazon S3 (with Jungle Disk).
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