1) The one I find invaluable and difficult to find elsewhere is that you don’t neeed to create a special container folder for uploads on your hard drive. You can select which folders you want to upload. This way, your file structure is preserved. So I can sync in real time some folders between my NAS, my powerful laptop and my lighter Tablet PC. And these folders don’t have to be the same on each mobile machine. Android and iOs are supported as well.
2) I get more or less realtime synchro of each file modified on any of these machines. If one of them is turned off, synchro will be reactivated as soon as it’s on again. By the way, you can also just back up some folders if you don’t want the synchro.
3) the files are crypted before being up/downloaded so process is not ultrafast but it’s not been a bother for me ‘cos I don’t upload movies or audio files.
4) you get forum support for the bits and pieces and email support if something goes bad. Never happened to me or to the several people around me who use the service. But I read in the forum that this can happen. We did experience 2 or 3 outages over the years but never past an hour. Since I always have a copy of the files on my NAS, I could calmly wait until the situation got back to normal.

Files can be shared with the Wuala Community if one feels enclined to do so or with some individual registered users of the service. Right now, it’s only a 1-way process (the person needs to save the files in its own folder hard disk and upload it in its own shared folder and not the initial one. So it’s been pretty useless for collab work. A new version of Wuala was announced for May and I hope they get it right this time.

Files can be shared with unregistered users through a link but I haven’t yet shared any on the social networks.

Due to the security measures mentioned under 3), accessing files from a computer which doesn’t have wuala applic is a pain. So I would not recommend this service to people who use Internet cafés to work from when on the road.

How about checking it out as a comparison? A free 2 Goplan is available.

As for its history, Wuala was developed by a teams of science geeks from the Zurich Polytechnics and later bought by French storage co LaCie which was painfully trying to provide a similar and more expensive service to its business customers. In the process, LaCie forced Wuala to put an end to the very functionality which attracted me to Wuala in the first place: trading storage. If you gave a bit of your hard disk space for p2p backup of other users files, you gain additional storage on Wuala. A win-win solution which spared a the 3rd or 4th wuala server config. Great as a way to to more fully use the hardware resources and save some energy. Shame on LaCie.

P.S. I don’t have any personal or business connection with Wuala other than being a user of their service.

FWIW, I like Lion.

The Mac Skydrive app requires Lion (10.7) or later of OSX.

Dave