Wuala Cancels Cloud Communism

Wuala , the analogue of the deservedly popular Dropbox, known for its “cloud communism” policy (how much disk space you provide - you get so many places in the cloud), changes the rules. Just a couple of hours ago, I received a letter with the following content:

Hi,

We have been working hard to improve the underlying storage system of Wuala. This improvement will be included for the first time in the next Wuala update, which is coming later this week.

While this change will bring many nice improvements, it also means that we are discontinuing the "trade storage" feature, which was a very hard decision for us to make.

We are aware what this change means for you, therefore we want to give you the amount of storage you have earned for the next twelve months at no cost. We highly appreciate that you have traded your personal storage and wanted to say thank you for contributing to our system.

The new system will bring quite a few long anticipated advantages:

- Incremental file updates (so small changes in a large file do not require the whole file to be uploaded again)
- Increased file size limit up to 100 GB
- Multiple concurrent downloads
- Much faster random access
- More stability (TCP instead of UDP, less router crashes, works better in corporate networks, etc.)
- More performance (less CPU and disk usage during up- and downloads)

Generally, this makes it more convenient to work with files stored directly in Wuala, particularly when accessing multiple files at the same time.

The new system will be rolled out step by step, so these advantages won't become available immediately. In case you want to try out the new system, please visit our forum forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2231.

Best,

Your Wuala Team


Summary:
We worked a lot on various improvements, but we will have to cancel the feature “disk space trading”. It was a tough decision, but ce la vie.

We know what this means for you, so during the year all the space earned remains in use for free. We really appreciate that you provided your personal disk space and want to thank you for it.
')
The new system will bring several long-awaited features:
- incremental updates (small changes to a large file will not result in a full file download)
- maximum file size increased to 100 gigabytes
- multiple simultaneous downloads
- much faster random access
- better stability (TCP instead of UDP)
- improved performance

The new system will be gradually put into operation, so not all of the improvements will be available immediately.

In my opinion, this is a failure. The main advantage over Dropbox is lost. To compete with him now will be difficult.