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LaCie to shutter Wuala cloud storage service, data deleted Nov 15

Parent company Seagate wants to make money, not burn it in the cloud

External disk and small NAS vendor LaCie will close its Wuala cloud storage service.

Wuala launched in 2008 under the auspices of a company called Caleido that in 2009 merged with LaCie. In the years since, LaCie has included wuala's software with many of its products to smooth the path from its devices to the cloud.

That cunning integration plan has obviously not gone well, or not well enough for Wuala to continue operations.

A Seagate spokesperson says the company "is discontinuing service of Wuala in order to focus attention on the key areas of business that we see the most opportunity for our growth and revenue." The company feels "partnerships with established consumer and SMB cloud offerings continue to demonstrate strong value to our customers, leading us to the decision to discontinue development of our own service."

Rather than worry about the reasons for Wuala's deminse, worry about your data: the outfit says purchases or renewals of storage ceased on August 17th and warns that uploads won't be possible as of September 30th. Come November 15th, “all data stored in the Wuala cloud will be deleted.”

Wuala's therefore urging users to “Please download the content in your Wuala account and safely backup it to your PC, Mac, external hard drive or another cloud storage provider.”

Those with an annual subscription will receive a proportional refund, unless they possess “less than USD/CHF/EUR 10 in remaining credit”. Wuala will hang onto that cash.

The outfit's also done a deal with another cloud storage service, Tresorit, and put in place a transfer wizard.

LaCie was acquired by Seagate in 2012 but left largely to itself. The FAQ about the closure says “Seagate/LaCie will retain the software and all intellectual property rights thereto. There is no transfer or sale of assets, business or otherwise from Seagate/LaCie to Tresorit.” ®

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