Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.