Gemalto YuuWaa Go review

YuuWaa Go is a slightly strange product, as the software comes on a 4GB USB flash drive, which you can buy for £12 from Ebuyer. This also gets you 20GB of online storage, although the subscription is for just six months. To continue, you need to sign up for a reasonable £18-per-year subscription.

Once you've created an account on the YuuWaa website, any files you store on the USB drive are automatically backed up to your storage space when you connect the drive to your PC. However, any files you have open at the time won't be backed up and files can't be synced directly between your PC and YuuWaa's online storage. That makes it less capable than even most online storage services.

New files and those changed since your last backup are backed up, minimising file transfer times, but you can't keep older versions of your files. If you lose the drive, you can recover the backed-up files from the website but must first pair another USB storage device with your account.

You can log into the web interface automatically by simply plugging your flash drive into any internet-connected PC. The interface is divided into three sections, the first showing files on your PC, the second showing those on your online space and the third showing the data on your flash drive. Data can be transferred by simply dragging and dropping files between the areas. Access to files in your online space is frustratingly restricted, as you can only copy them back to your flash drive, not to the PC. This also means that you can't download anything from your online storage unless you have the USB drive with you.

The cumbersome interface lacks polish and convenience. Toolbar icons are small and cryptically labelled, while changes made to the directories on our PC failed to register until we manually refreshed the page. Files stored online can be shared with others. You can send an email with a download link to files, but you can share only one file per link, so sharing large numbers of files is impossible.

YuuWaa is an interesting idea, but it's just too restrictive to compete with other online backup services. Livedrive is much better all round.