Farewell Wuala, hail Tresorit!

Being so content with Wuala’s features I gulped when I read that they shut their service down. At least they partnered with Tresorit, another Swiss zero-knowledge cloud storage provider, to provide a dedicated transition path. Tresorit had failed for me in my research last year, because they didn’t provide a Linux client—meanwhile, they do, but it’s still a beta. In addition, there’s no easy way to test their service other than during a 14-day trial. [Update 25 Aug: The trial period is now 30 days.]

Rather than looking at what they had in common, I checked Tresorit against my usual requirements, and sadly, it misses a few points:

• There’s no on-demand-only download of files like in Wuala. You either sync 100% of a GB-heavy “Tresor”, or not at all. In Wuala, you could browse through the directory tree without allocating much disk space. [Update 25 Aug: Their desktop client is also a cloud file browser, where you can explicitly download files from unsynced Tresors.]
• The client doesn’t provide an unencrypted view of an encrypted data container on the disk while it runs. If the client shuts down, the files remain plainly unencrypted in the file system like with Dropbox. [Update 25 Aug: Files remain unencrypted only if you actually sync a Tresor.]
• There’s only a Premium plan with 100 GB for one user, or a Business plan with 1 TB for at least two users. If you only need 200 or 300 GB, you’re out of luck, as it seems. [Update 25 Aug: For Wuala switchers, their Business plan is now also available for a single user, what means 1 TB for just double the price.]

Luckily, they have planned to implement the first two, but that could take a while.

And, other than Wuala’s and Tresorit’s recommendation to export Wuala’s data once and import it as a single Tresor into Tresorit, I found out it’s much better to reorganize Wuala’s subfolders into dedicated Tresors. This makes sense, because you can configure which Tresors to sync on each machine. This way, you could e.g. create a dedicated Tresor for each employer and sync only that, so you don’t accidentally put private or third-party data onto your employer’s machines. Should you need access to one of those unsynced Tresors, though, you either do have to sync it (100%), use their web client (but file download failed in my first test), or use one of your mobile clients. [Update 25 Aug: Their desktop client is also a cloud file browser, where you can explicitly download files from unsynced Tresors.]

But, so far their service looks promising. Their clients are much more modern; e.g. Wuala’s Java desktop app or Android app have been an inferior UX. I neither know Wuala’s nor Tresorit’s user numbers, but that kind-of “merger” might generate a user base that helps Tresorit survive for a while.

And never forget: Any item in the cloud should only be a copy of an item on one of your disks.