ASUS WebStorage
ASUS WebStorage is a cloud storage service which is aggressively marketed by ASUS through e-mail spam to anyone who's given them an e-mail account at some point. There are client available for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS and a broken .deb package from 2014 for Linux. There's no Flatpak or Snap or AppImage or actually usable .deb or .rpm packages available.
New customers who sign up using links from their e-mail spam campaigns get 1 TB of storage for one year for free, other customers can get 5 GB for 30 days (not a very compelling offer). The huge amount of e-mail spam from ASUS (likely due to having registered motherboards from them) regarding their WebStorage is how we became aware of this service.
published 2019-12-13 - last edited 2022-10-29
Limitations[edit]
ASUS offers a free 1 TB plan to anyone they spam. While this seems like a lot it's quite useless due to a 500 MB file size limitation. Their paid plans have a much larger 10 GB single file size limit.
Performance[edit]
Testing the web client was the only option since the Linux client is both wildly outdated and broken (see below).
- Uploading a 400 MiB file to ASUS Webstorage had an average of 3.5 MiB/s on the 100mbit connection (=10 MB/s limit) used to test.
- Downloading that same file from ASUS's cloud is slower, the download had a 1.2 MiB/s average.
Bandwidth measurements were done using bmon. Your transfer speeds to the "ASUS cloud" will depend on your location. The speeds to ASUS WebStorage are clearly not anywhere near what they should be from northern Europe.
The (non-Native) Linux Client[edit]
ASUS's Linux desktop client is actually a .exe file which runs in mono. Extracting their ASUSWebStorage.deb can be done using the ar command with the -x[1]. This produces the archives control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. The "control" contains a package description for Debians apt, the control.tar.gz file can be extracted by running tar xfvz control.tar.gz which produces the folders etc/ and usr/ with a systemd file and the actual cloud client respectively.
The packages mono-core and mono-winforms would be requirements on Fedora and CentOS. Debian-based systems would pull libnotify0.4-cil and libmono-winforms2.0-cil (due to them being listed in the control file).
The mono client will, in practice, not work even if all the dependencies are present. This may have to do with the fact that ASUSs latest version ships a ASUSWebStorage.exe created in April, 2014. It is made for Ubuntu 10 which is ancient and not supported by Ubuntu or anyone else.
Verdict and Conclusion[edit]
Leaving GNU/Linux users with a non-functional web client which has not been updated since 2014, five years form the time of writing, is unacceptable.
The transfer speeds from the location where we tested their service are also quite unacceptable. This is absolutely not a great cloud storage solution for people in the European Union. This aspect will likely differ if you are in Asia or America.
Links[edit]
The ASUS WebStorage website is at store.asuswebstorage.com.
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