Backing up data to a free cloud service Wuala

Admins are of two types: those who ...

1. don't make backups yet
2. already doing

So, we are already doing backups, and it doesn’t matter if our experience or someone else’s was the cause. And we already know that one backup should be available at hand, and the other - for a thousand kilometers. With backup that is “at hand” - in general, everything is clear. With a remote backup, everything is also simple, if you have the desire and ability to pay for these services. And if we want to "on the ball"?


One of these services is Wuala . Provide 5 GB of storage for free (you can expand for several gigs more by participating in promotions, inviting friends, etc.), positioning your service as secular: data is transmitted and stored in encrypted form (according to advertising). I note that the Wuala client can work both with a graphical interface (quite good) and from the console.

Access to the file system of cloud storage can be obtained through client software. In Linux, this software (java!) Allows you to mount my storage into a separate daddy through its specific fuse module. Simlinks, however, are not supported, but files can be stored, and this is already a lot.
The architecture of the application is such that you first need to start the daemon, which all initializes, updated, if necessary, connects to cloud servers. Subsequent invocations of wualacmd allow you to send commands to the daemon, such as login, logout.
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Unfortunately, I was not able to find a method that would have revealed that the wuala-demon had started successfully and was ready to accept commands. In a condition while the demon is not ready to accept wualacmd invocation commands are completed with code 0, so the “warmth and care” of developers about the users of the console is felt. To bind to the specific syntax of error messages \ success in the console - especially since they can be very different - I did not want to. This is partly why the code checks the success of the completion of some operations in the script is implemented as implemented, and takes as much as 10 seconds just to wait until the wuala-demon is ready to work. Well, for a nightly scheduled script of 10 seconds - the loss is not great.

Wuala securacy

A few words about Wuala. For me, the fact that the type of access from private to public with access by reference is immediately suspicious looks like a suspicious one. Even for large files. How can this be, if the file is stored on the server in encrypted form?
Maybe server veils are able to decrypt files marked as public on the fly? If so, does wuala then keep my password to decrypt the data? What key is the data encrypted? Who owns it, only me? Or there is no key during storage, and only file transfer over the network is encrypted? And is it encrypted? - I did not check.

Anyway, storing our important data using third-party infrastructure requires us to encrypt our data. gpg, encfs or any other tool to help.

As a result of working on this task, approximately such a script was born. As a result of the script execution, the wuala daemon in the screen session with the name “wuala” will start (if it is not started yet). A login will be made with the specified login and password and the code from the wualaSync function will be executed with a subsequent logout. Upon completion of the script, the demon in the screenshot is not nailed to be turned on the next time.



All sorts of improvements - welcome!