Wuala Launches Online P2P Backup Service

The Switzerland-based, service (pronounced like the French "Voilà") is the outcome of three years of research and dedication to simplify web-based file storage and sharing.

If your work involves handling many files and you do need an online storage place, than Wua.la. could really be your choice. The service, which is not at all your ordinary internet file storage service, was launched yesterday and besides storing your files it also allows you to share them with a group of friends. To do that you have to create an account, add your friends, and then you can go ahead with sharing the files you want them to have.

This is how it works - Files are encrypted on the user's own PC and then fragmented into little pieces and uploaded to both Wuala's servers and many other users' machines (called by the service 'social grid storage') to create a storage solution.

Wuala also comes with another offer – it sells you additional storage space (from $25 a year for 10GB to $1000 for 1TB), but also allows users to trade their own local disk space for cloud storage space. For every 5GB of space shared on your local drive, you will be given an extra 5GB of online storage. Considering how cheap hard disks are these days, the deal is rather fair. Users who share their local hard disk space can also turn off advertising on Wuala.

Wuala's client basically resembles a local folder and you can chose to share any of your files stored on Wuala with either your friends or a group of users.

All things considered, the site makes an excellent alternative to online file storage and sharing. Wuala's local client is written in Java and runs on OSX, Windows, and Linux.