Technology

Wuala is based on a novel technology that we have researched and developed for the most part at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. A number of important aspects distinguish Wuala from other services.

Privacy and Security

Wuala protects your privacy: In stark contrast to most other online storage services, all your files get encrypted on your computer, so that no one - including the employees at Wuala and LaCie - can access your private files. Your password never leaves your computer.

Wuala employs the 128 bit AES, 2048 bit RSA and SHA-256 algorithms for encryption, signatures and integrity checks. If you're interested in how Wuala manages encryption, have a look at our publication on Cryptree.

Reliability

When you store a file, it is first encrypted on your computer and then chunked up and encoded into redundant fragments using erasure codes (Reed-Solomon codes). These encrypted, redundant fragments are then stored in our European data centers and in the Wuala cloud. We make sure that your data is always safe. A complete backup of your encrypted files is always kept on our servers, so that it can always be accessed and restored. The Wuala cloud serves as an optimization that allows us to operate a large-scale infrastructure at low cost and to provide you with better performance. Also, it allows organizations to get access to reliable online storage by providing their own resources to the Wuala cloud.

Get More Storage

You start with 1 GB provided by us. If you want more, you can either buy more storage, or trade some space on your hard disk for additional online storage. The idea behind trading is not to give you more storage in total, but to change the quality of your storage: Wuala is able to transform local storage into online storage that can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, even when your computer is offline. Please note that trading is an option, not an obligation. If you need extra space but don't want to trade, you can always buy additional storage instead.

Desktop Client and Web Start

Wuala comes as a convenient application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can also be started directly from within the browser, elegantly bridging web and desktop. This has the advantage of drag and drop support, the ability to upload files in the background and to work offline. Wuala integrates with your system as a network drive so you can open and edit your files in your favorite application. Also, links to files and folders can be sent to friends, who can click directly on the link and access the files in the browser.

Open Source

We love open source technology and Wuala is based on a number of open source projects. We did open source Wuala Webstart and Wuala Persistent Map.