Since I compared Dropbox and Wuala I did some further, in-depth investigation how Wuala works and if it really fits my needs. And while I still love the idea of the “Swiss bank” there are some drawbacks that you should be aware of if you want to use Wuala for backup purposes:
- Wuala does not backup Symlinks. It simply ignores them. So if you backup on a Linux or OSX System all Symlinks will be gone. I wonder why they do not simply store the original value of the symlink?
- Wuala does not store permissions properly. If you restore all permissions are gone.
- Wuala does not warn if the backup does not execute for a while. So if you leave it running in the background and there is some issue you won’t notice until it is too late.
- Wuala does not seem to use the OS events system but instead searches for changed files “manually”. This makes it slower and uses more resourced than needed (compared to i.e. Dropbox). File system notify tools exist for all platforms (i.e. here) and should be used for performance reasons.
While I could live with #3 and #4 and eventually even with #2, I really dislike the issue #1 – that symlinks are simply ignored. The Dropbox solution (include everything from the symlink) would also not work for a real-world backup… and I really wonder why Wuala says it is a “backup solution” if it cannot handle simple symlinks.
3 comments
Klaus Johannes Rusch · 10.01.2012 at 17:01
Tivoli Storage Manager to the rescue!
Gianluca · 10.01.2012 at 17:46
Hey, Gianluca from Wuala here.
We already have some tickets open in our bug tracker, here are the links:
http://bugs.wuala.com/view.php?id=1002 and http://bugs.wuala.com/view.php?id=3151 (feel free to comment on these issues if you like, feedback is always welcome
Unfortunately it seems that something went a little wrong with point number 3 you mentioned. We should display this at least in the backup logs (if this happens again, just send us the logs to support@wuala.com and we’re glad to help of course).
We’re also working on point number 4 (I just talked to one of our developers) and we try to improve this in the future.
Again, thank you for your feedback.
All the best,
Gianluca
Admin comment by Michael · 11.01.2012 at 10:26
Gianluca,
thanks for the prompt reply. Highly appreciated!
Unfortunately both of the tickets are already open since 2010 and still not fixed – and without proper handling of Symlinks Wuala cannot be used for serious backup purposes.
Regarding #3 – yes, logs might help, but it might also be very useful to warn i.e. via e-mail in case the Backup fails for some time. I usually do not check out the logs regularly… and there should be no need to.
Again, thanks for the ticket numbers, hopefully you will fix those long-open bugs soon.
Michael