I had this great idea just last week that people could share their idle resources and some extra hard drive storage in return for online storage. Online storage offers benefits such as remote backups in case of emergency, access to your files from anywhere, and it frees up your laptop’s hard drive for other uses other than just storage. Well, it seems my idea was not original in the least. A Swiss company called “Wuala” has already thought of this and has done an excellent job of making it a reality AND made sure it worked on Windows, Mac, and Linux!

With Wuala, you start out with 1gb of storage, but if you allow them to use 100gb of your hard drive and your computer is on 70% of the time, you will get 70gb. It all depends on the storage you give up and how long you are online to get bigger amounts from them. Even your bandwidth is matched. You tell them how much upload and download bandwidth you want to donate and you get that in return.

Now if you’re like me, a few alarms go off with security and hopefully I can calm your nerves with a simple explanation. Wuala encrypts every file you upload to their network and that file remains encrypted with every bit that is stored on random machines. It works similar to the Bittorrent technology in that it splits your files into fragments and disperses them across the network. It is impossible for the person hosting one of your fragments to see any of it without your encryption key. If you want to share files with friends, you can add them as your friend in the Wuala interface and they will be able to access that particular file or folder. You also have the option of sharing publicly to the “World”.

This is just a brief summary, but I highly recommend trying the service out. I believe this has the potential of being the next big file-sharing platform as well as a viable solution for a safe, secure remote backups. <disclaimer> Of course ITchurch.com does not endorse illegal file-sharing, but that’s not all file-sharing utilities are good for. </end disclaimer>

Feel free to comment or email me for an invite as it’s currently invite-only.