Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu One

[Slobodan]

Ha ha ha ha ha! Well of course they lost the bloody battle! Other cloud storage providers allowed you to actually store the files there. In Ubuntu One, files are only syncronised (so if you delete them of your drive, they are deleted on the cloud too), which is useless to me (can't even use it for backup)...

[Luke]

They CAN'T shut down Ubuntu, as it will run with or without support

A year from now the headline is going to simply be, "Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu".

If Canonical as a whole simply shut down, all existing Ubuntu installs would continue to run just fine, there would just be no new support efforts from Canonical. Probably someone would keep the package archives availabe. My guess would be either Debian or Mint would do this. Meanwhile there would be migration scripts to convert Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distros to ones based directly on Debian.

[Anarchy]

I almost became a paying user, but the quality of the service stopped me.
Before expanding my storage, I started setting up machines to use Ubuntu One. First I got some problems with Windows, but I let it pass. Than I've tried installing on my Debian machine, didn't even manage to get it running...
I gave up and tried GDrive, Dropbox, SpiderOak, Copy... The winner btsync and rsync.

btsync and rsync are definitely not the solution for everyday work. I used u1 on ubuntu machines and everything worked fine. It least for me. Maybe the problem was that they claimed it was multiplatform, when in reality it could work only on Ubuntu. That is less than one-platform.

[tomato]

That part should also be doable by using EncFS locally and having the encrypted shadow directory synced.

Cheers,
_

EncFS encryption is very badly implemented (lot's of questionable stuff, many things not done according to cryptographic best practice).

Don't use it.

[mischael]

I use unison and its great. Setting up an SSH server with certificate authentication is easy and unison performs very well even with hundreds of gigabytes. I synchronize every half an hour my whole home directory, which is about 130 GB and over a million files (some really big repositories). And it takes about 5 seconds including file transfer. Only the first sync takes long. And there are even clients for android that can also sync from SSH/sftp, although they are not as efficient as unison.

[panda84]

For those interested in how services treat your data:

http://owncloud.org/the-user-data-manifesto/

http://userdatamanifesto.org/

[russofris]

I did some testing of Canonical's cloud services in the 11.10 and 12.04 timeframe. I was disappointed. My hope was that they would eventually be able to fix their issues since web based storage and synchronization aren't exactly rocket science. Hearing the news today, I'm actually curious as to what's really going on in Canonical. The key to U1 wasn't that it had to be the highest bandwidth, the largest amount of space, or the cheapest. The Key was rock solid reliability and integration with Ubuntu. I'm really surprised that they couldn't make it work.

That said, I'm completely unsurprised that their music store didn't work out. Asking people to pay for something that's already free is a pretty tough thing to do.

[philip550c]

There's an unofficial open source Linux client.

You beat me to it. I have been using this client for about a week and it works well.

[Delgarde]

I have read that the Python use in Dropbox is limited to the user interface and other basic logic, the actual file and network IO is done by librsync which is written in C.

Yes, that's correct. Of course, the motives for that are mixed - performance may benefit from having that part written in C, but it also allows source code to be hidden. Writing it all in Python would mean giving all users the code that interfaces with the Dropbox servers...

[johnc]

A year from now the headline is going to simply be, "Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu".