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Wuala Encrypted Cloud-Storage Service Shuts Down
New submitter craigtp writes: Wuala, one of the more trusted cloud-storage services that employed encryption for your files, is shutting down. Users of the service will have until 15th November 2015 to move all of their files off the service before all of their data is deleted. From the announcement: "Customers who have an active prepaid annual subscription will be eligible to receive a refund for any unused subscription fees. Your refund will be calculated based on a termination date effective from today’s date, even though the full service will remain active until 30 September 2015 and your data will be available until 15 November 2015. Refunds will be automatically processed and issued to eligible customers in coming weeks. Some exceptions apply. Please visit www.wuala.com for more information."
NSA strikes again...
That sucks.
Who said it was? In this case you paid for space, and you got it. They are closing down and you get your files back AND a refund. I see no issue here. no different than if you had your crap in a storage unit and they decided to close down mid contract.
This is how a business runs, and when it closes, how it properly closes.
Sad to see it go, but I applaud them giving notice. A month is plenty of time to set up another provider. I hope none of their customers miss the announcements.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Your rational, sober, succinct and to the point comments have no place here. Or pretty much anywhere else on the internet. Or television. Or talk radio. Definitely not talk radio.
There are plenty of NSA-proof alternatives.
It's called 'the hard drive in the computer on my desk'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Well .... yes you did pay for space .... but not always with money.
Wuala used to let yet trade local { space, uptime, bandwith } for cloud space.
They got rid of that a while ago.
That was quite annoying as I'd built up a 50Gb cloud space and was using about half of it for archive ... more fool me!
They cancelled the trading arangements ... cancelled that cloud space ... and then wouldn't let you log back it to clean the over-space amounts once they'd reset your account back to the fremium levels.
It's no wonder Wuala went under ... you can't trust anyone, encryption or not, once they start changing the deal arbitrarily.
-- I'm probably posting this A/C .... I can't be fecked logging in.
It is the way of his kind.
I'm sorry they're shutting down. At least they're giving their users some notice, which is good.
I suspect there's a niche market in encrypted storage online that would be marketed as (supposedly) "NSA proof", if such a thing is even possible. I suspect that the current reach of the NSA is for all intents and purposes unlimited in the US. I doubt there's much they couldn't get into if they wanted to.
I mean, we know that Wall Street has been thoroughly and utterly penetrated and is basically the plaything of corporations and financial houses.Add in the activity by blackhats ripping off whatever they can from the major brokerage houses and Wall Street is a joke in terms of any fairness.
Given that, is it so far-fetched to surmise that the NSA has managed to get it's taps into virtually every communication medium we use? (Especially after the recent revelations about AT&T being in cahoots with the NSA.) At this point I'd be more surprised if they didn't have everything tapped.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
But also plausible might be that the encryption has been cracked or breached lets say by white or black hats, and the site decides to let the customers get their data out and shut down before the breach is known across the the full hat population.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
By "the truth" you mean the exact same post slightly modified to fit with the topic being discussed? I find American politics funny and pointless. Everyone's 100% committed to his own colour of right-wing party while still being blind that they're both the same.
I've been using Sync.com for the past year. They've been sort of in beta but releasing features. 5GB free.
SpiderOak is decent but they recently dropped their free plan, so not sure what's going on there.
MEGA was great but Kim.com said last week in Wired that the company is run by criminals
Tresorit is good but expensive. Maybe that's why they've been around so long.
Bitcasa pulled a Wuala last year and closed down their consumer cloud storage after a lawsuit. That's pretty much it. There's OwnCloud which is do it yourself. And BitTorrent Sync which is kind of do it yourself but they've been adjusting pricing so it's bait and switch as well.
I wonder if the service is able to cope with all its users rushing to retrieve their data before the deadline.
Wuala is owned by Lacie. Lacie was purchase by Seagate in 2014. Seagate has it's own online backup products. Maybe Seagate wants to eliminate a redudant or money-losing service? It happens...
Yes, the NSA is the bogeyman, and is a threat to secure encryption everywhere. But the invisible hand of capitalism can slap someone as well.
Customers who want privacy won't trust Wuala , they'll use local storage, or if they really have no choice but to use cloud, they'll only upload encrypted files they encrypted themselves.
Customers that don't yet* care about privacy won't pay extra to get this.
* I find they don't care about privacy right up until it bites them in the ass, then suddenly its massive to them. The "dump facebook" moment.
President Trump will change that flawed perception that Republicans are dishonest morons.
lucm, indeed.
How is Dropbox doing lately? This is what worries me about "the cloud"...how to pick the winner to adopt before the end of the contest.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
>They are closing down and you get your files back AND a refund.
Of course copies your files may go to various government agencies as well.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Wuala is also something I've *never* heard of despite being generally well informed in this arena.
When you have virtually zero brand recognition, that's not a good sign.
Please help metamoderate.
Get a friend to agree to peer with you, or set up a second old netbook or something with a spare drive. Safer than the cloud, no third parties to trust.
It's like btsync, but GPL and no folder limit.
There's a mile of difference between a physical storage unit and cloud storage.
It is possible to monitor your physical storage unit to make sure nobody gets in. During the tenancy period, it is effectively yours. How many times have you been allowed to do something analogous for your cloud provider?
In fact, "crap in a storage unit" is probably one of the most secure, low cost way of storing backups, noting that one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes.
Wow, a one word post. Too lazy to even copy the subject line into the comment area so it makes sense? Lame.
.
NSA checks your credit card history.
NSA finds a payment to a storage unit.
NSA gets in a car.
NSA drives to a hardware store.
NSA buys a bolt cutter.
NSA drives to the storage unit.
NSA rummages through your stuff after using the 'key' they just bought.
Yep, very secure. I'd look up that XKCD comic with the five dollar wrench if I felt like it.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
and this is the typical stereotype thrown at americans by smug europeans who think they're not subject to the same kinds of kool-aid propaganda in their home countries.
Yeah whatever. neocon 'christians' or 'liberal' marxists, what's the difference? Both are dogmatic, big statist ideologues who always want a bit more of my money, a bit more control over my property, and a bit more of my liberty. Whether it's for jesus, the children, or for the latest socjus oppression quest, the excuse is the same and it's getting old and foul smelling.
I'll make my own cloud, with blackjack and hookers! ...
wait, that's just owning a computer, an internet connection, a blackjack game, and hookers.
The cloud is not a storage in any permanent sense.
Before we start on the conspiracy theories - ANYONE who relies on a third party to encrypt their stuff is not worried about security. Not really.
And any cloud provider will accept and store encrypted files that ONLY YOU have the key to.
Considering that the data is encrypted on the client and only stored in encrypted form on the servers, that won't do much good.
Unless, of course, Wuala secretly copied the encryption keys.
That's not a scalable attack. That only works on specific targets. A warrant to a cloud storage provider gets them access to thousands of users' data at once. Not to mention that the end users have no way to know it happened (i.e. no broken lock).
NSA finds every bit of your stuff packed in a pretty tough safe and the storage unit owner doesn't know the combination.
That's local encryption for you. Your trust in the service is replaced by trust in the encryption algorithm.
Whoooosh!!!!
You're really not as smart as you think you are.
In fact, "crap in a storage unit" is probably one of the most secure, low cost way of storing backups
Except in a generic storage pod..... any random thief is one pair of bolt cutters away from raiding your unit for anything interesting, and insurance only covers the replacement cost of the media itself, not the data on it.
I use FOSS/ownCloud based OwnDrive.com and love it.
.. way out the door.
And thank you very much for your business.
Now get the heck out of my servers.
Stopped using it after they killed that feature a few years ago.
Let this be ANOTHER lesson boys and girls.
1. Keep your data under YOUR control by keeping it on hardware that YOU own and have 100% control over.
2. Only companies that actually encrypt data get shut down. The ones that pretend to encrypt it, get hacked and then they do it again and again.
Yeah.. there's no boom in the cloud services industry. It will go away, hopefully sooner than later.
People really should ask about the mean time to failure for cloud storage companies before using them for storing data they dont have redundantly backed up elsewhere.
John_Chalisque
sometimes hype is just that
I am really sorry to hear that. I have been using Wuala for about a year and I can say it was just fine for my needs. However, I have also been using other cloud services that are highly focused on security, such as pCloud and Tresorit, and I'd like to say, those are very good as well. On one hand, in Tresorit security is the one and only priority, which is very good because I store a lot of sensitive data. On the other hand, pCloud is just as secure as Tresorit, but is a lot more user friendly, and is suitable for regular users as well. Plus, pCloud is more affordable, which, in my view, is an important benefit. So, I personally don't worry about my files right now.
Cloud applications have come and gone. They have been bought out by other companies and changed their policies on retention practices (I'm staring at you Microsoft/Hotmail), services have been discontinued (looking at you Yahoo pipes) like in this article.
So, what can you do to protect yourself - particularly for your archived backup data?
1. If you don't have a lot of money - and you have a friend who is reasonably trustworthy:
a) buy a lock box
b) buy two external drives (Terabyte or better size).
c) plug one into your computer, and put the other one in the lock box.
d) deliver the lock box offsite to your trustworthy friend's house.
e) set up your backups to go to the external drive - preferably encrypted.
f) swap out the drives in the lockbox periodically.
* if you are concerned about incremental backups between the time you swap the external drives, you could use a high capacity USB stick to capture incremental backups - and put that in your pocket ever time you leave the house.
In the event of a house fire, you would have your last offsite backups at your friend's house, and any incrementals in your pocket.
If you have slightly more money - you could simply set up your own server at a hosting service (e.g. Rackspace et al) - and make that your 'cloud'. As someone mentioned - this may only be feasible if you also upgrade your network to have enough bandwidth to handle the expected load. Of course, If all I have to worry about are incremental backups after and initial full backup (and maybe you only do a full backup infrequently after that) - then it might be doable (set up the backup to kick off when your system is largely idle - e.g. 2am - assuming you're not a nightowl...)
On the other hand, if you have a large amount of disposable income, you might consider using offsite services such as Iron Mountain etc - to do all the legwork of taking your backup drives offsite and storing them and so on.
Problem solved.
In the interests of full disclosure - my personal risk assessment determined that the largest threat to my data was in the form of disk crashes - which distributing multiple copies of the data around my own network sufficed. In the event of a fire, the plan is to grab the external backup disk, the CD sleve, the mac mini (all of which I can carry under one arm), and bail. However, if you need more protection than that - the above should work for you.
scalable: free surplus storage (unencrypted) if you click here*.
* this button will unencrypt ALL your data