"...is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices?" I have no idea what the performan

"...is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices?" I have no idea what the performance difference is (and clearly , neither do you), but the answer to your question is "yes". For some people, at least. It's a must-have feature for some people, not a nice-to-have-as-long-as-it-doesn't-inconvenience-me-too-much feature. Some people have data that they'd like to keep synced across systems that they simply can't keep in unencrypted form on a third-party server, no matter how much trust they have in the company that owns the service. Of course, there are a bunch of different ways to keep your data secure and still have it be available to you on different systems, and non-open-sourced cloud storage with client-side encryption is still an imperfect solution, but it is a solution that is perfectly reasonable for many people.