LaCie: Wuala ceases to trade storage, loses essence
Wuala, which merged with LaCie in March 2009, has shocked many users by announcing that trading is no longer supported.
What remains?
A good set of features, some of which are summarised by sobri909:
… Wuala is, to my knowledge, the only service that is technically capable of acting as primary storage rather than only as sync sync or backup.
There are a bunch of services out there that offer cloud storage, but so far I've yet to find another that can adequately provide cloud storage as primary storage, with intelligent local caching of frequently/recently accessed data, with adjustable cache size, and with persistent network drive availability.
Competitors tend to offer solutions that cache poorly, without configurable cache size, and without reliable mounted network drive access. You simply can't treat them as though they are a local disk, which is what you can do with Wuala.
What's lost?
Some of the essence of Wuala.
A recent comment to the 2009 video Wuala — a distributed file system recalls how trading of local storage was described:
"Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."
They just killed this feature. A bad, bad, decision.
Trust
So many cloud-oriented service providers. It can take much time for a customer to build trust in a provider. I began using Wuala in February 2009.
After two years, in 2011 I began cautiously recommending Wuala to selected friends and colleagues, and providing a little support. Things were (still are) rough around the edges, but considering some technical brilliance by ETH/Wuala — considering the essence and direction — I forgave the roughness. I was prepared to continue installing, recommending and supporting.
All my recommenations, most of which were made in private, emphasised the benefits of trading. Users found the concept of trading easy to grasp, and were appreciative.
I'm now extremely disappointed:
- by the decision, under LaCie, to cease trading storage
- moreover, by the ways in which the decision was announced — no coherent technical explanation.
Much trust has been lost.
Buying storage
If LaCie had progressed Wuala suitably, I would have begun buying remote storage (spending less on local storage) in 2012 or 2013.
Now: the double disappointment causes me to lose so much faith in LaCie and Wuala that I'll probably never purchase from this provider.
What next?
For myself:
- I'll make a local copy of my remote content
- I don't plan to remove my content, the vast majority of which is public or shared
- I'm seeking alternatives, with a focus on open source — I considered many alternatives a few months ago, there are now a few more to add to the list.
For the people to whom I recommended Wuala:
- I can't imagine what LaCie will do with Wuala in the future, I'll probably begin winding down my support for the product
- if you use less than 2 GB (the free quota that currently applies to all users) you should have no immediate concerns.
Links
Wuala's Security: Introduction (2010-03-25)
