Gemalto YuuWaa Go review

Gemalto’s YuuWaa Go is unlike any other online storage service we’ve seen before.

For £20, you get a 4GB USB flash drive and 8GB of online storage, although after six months you’ll have to pay an extra ?32 (around £27) a year to continue using the online storage. Once you’ve created an account on the YuuWaa website and set a schedule using a program on the flash drive, any files you store on the drive are automatically backed up to your storage space when you plug in the drive.

Only new files or those added since your last backup are synchronised, minimising file transfer times. Disappointingly, you can’t keep older versions of your files. If you lose the drive, you can recover the backed-up files from the website. However, to do this you must first pair another USB storage device with your online space. There are no options to back up files automatically from your PC to the flash drive. You could use any third-party backup program to do this, but this feature should really be included as standard.

You can log into the web interface automatically by simply plugging your flash drive into any internet-connected PC. You can set a password to stop any unauthorised access. Once logged in, you can copy files to and from your online space. However, any files you add this way aren’t automatically synchronised with your flash drive, which is an annoying oversight.

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. Access to files on your online space is frustratingly restricted, as you can only copy them back to your flash drive, not to the PC.

Although the interface looks straightforward, it can be cumbersome. Toolbar icons are small and cryptically labelled, and although the files in your online space and flash drive can be viewed as a grid of icons or a list, the contents of your PC can only be viewed using a small, cramped tree view.

Files stored online can also 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 unwieldy.

Automatically backing up files to both a USB disk and an online storage space adds an extra layer of protection against data loss, but YuuWaa Go is currently too poorly designed for us to recommend. Even the flexible pricing plans – you can buy as little as an extra 1GB of online storage or as much as 200GB – aren’t enough to make it worth buying.