Wuala: Peer to peer online file storage and sharing

February 14, 2008

By Brad Linder

If you’re tired of online storage services that give you just a gigabyte or two of space for your files, you might want ot check out Wuala. It’s a peer to peer storage solution, which means that you can store a near infinite amount of data online just by freeing up some space on your own hard drive to host other users’ encrypted files. Wuala is currently in private alpha, but we’ve got 500 invites to give away. Read on to find out how to snag one.

When you first sign up for Wuala, you’ll be able to upload up to 1GB. Once you’ve demonstrated that you’ve got a high speed internet connection and that your computer is on for more than 4 hours a day, Wuala will let you allocate free space on your hard drive for hosting other users files. If you make 10GB available, you’ll be able to upload 10GB of your own files. Sharing 50GB will net you 50GB of online storage. And so on.

The program interface is familiar and easy to use. It looks a lot like Windows Explorer, with a system of folders and file icons. You can easily create or delete folders just by right-clicking to bring up a context menu. And you can either upload files by opening an “Add Files” window or just by dragging and dropping them from your desktop.
When you upload a file it’s encrypted, broken up into bits, and then sent out to multiple computers for storage. That redundancy means when you want to download your files, you don’t have to wait for an individual user to be online. It also means that downloads should be super-speedy since you can download from multiple sources simultaneously. And since the files are encrypted, the users who are hosting them for you can’t read them unless you choose to share your files.

There is a sort of social networking aspect to Wuala. You can mark folders as public, private, or shared. Contents of a public folder can be viewed by any Waula user, while shared folders can only be seen by your friends. But if you want to treat Wuala as a personal private storage space, you don’t need to do anything special. Your folders will all be marked private by default.

You can also browse public files uploaded by other users. That includes photos, videos, audio, and documents. You can search by tag, most viewed, or most recently uploaded.

Your computer treats Wuala like a network drive, but its contents aren’t displayed. In a few weeks, Wuala plans to release an update that will let you treat the application as a virtual hard drive so you can drag and drop files directly through a file explorer. This means you will also be able to automate backups using tools like SyncBack or Cobian Backup.

In the future, the developers may add their own backup utilities to Wuala. The company also plans to release an API so that 3rd party developers can write their own applications.

Overall we’re pretty impressed with Wuala so far. The only thing we don’t particularly like is the service’s hard to remember URL. Type www.wuala.com into your web browser and you get a domain parking page. If you want to get to Wuala’s page, you’ll have to go to wua.la. If you just plan on using the desktop client that’s not a big problem since you only need to visit the site to download and install your software once. But in future releases, you’ll be able to launch Wuala from the web site and share files and links through the website.

Wuala is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

The first 500 Download Squad readers to use the invitation code “downloadsquad” can get in on the private alpha. Just go to download.wua.la, download the Wuala client for your operating system, and enter the code when prompted.