15 ms·

Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

298 points by endijs 13y ago

etfb 13y ago
That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading themselves too thin.
- skc 13y ago
  This is the first I'm hearing of Skydrive being considered a failure. What is that based on exactly?
  - dnissley 13y ago
    I think he was saying that it, too, was a bandwagon feature. Not that it was a failure.
  - etfb 13y ago
    Hearts and minds. It's a free product and installed and activated (and pushed!) by default in Win8, as far as I can see, so you can't really measure success, but I would estimate one in three non-tech-savvy people I talk to understand what Dropbox is, and maybe one in fifty understand what SkyDrive is. So I'd call it a failure without too much hesitation.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Yeah, and honestly the setup in early versions was horrible. I tried so many times to make it work and gave up in the end. They shouldn't have released it so early back then when it was obviously not production ready.
  - tomswartz07 13y ago
    I agree. I just logged in to see my files and pull anything if necessary. Looks like the last time files were changed was Sept of 2009. Obviously, I haven't used it since then.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    This approach to things is what killed Ubuntu (yes, killed, not is killing). See PulseAudio, Unity, etc
    - gtaylor 13y ago
      Why does PulseAudio have anything to do with Ubuntu? AFAIK, there is no relation between the two, other than the fact that Ubuntu offers PulseAudio (along with almost every other distro).
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        I must admit that, more than once, an Ubuntu upgrade killed my audio and I had to go and fix it myself. It's really painful that a distro that wants to be number 1 is so broken at times.
        tomswartz07 13y ago
        I don't think it's more that they push non-prod ready packages (yes, they do) but the fact that their update model doesn't easily allow them to fix bugs from upstream. The vast majority of the packages in Ubuntu (more notably in the LTS releases) are all custom patched by Ubu-devs. Rather than taking the raw package and pushing it through, they have a semi-opaque method of testing, patching, and then releasing to the greater community. I've tried several times to get an 'in' so that I could help with the process, but it seems to me like a 'club hangout' where outsiders are slightly discouraged. :(
        makomk 13y ago
        In the case of PulseAudio, there are no stable upstream releases, so distros basically have to backport fixes themselves in order to get working audio. Red Hat (who fund most of the development) do the same. New upstream versions come with new features and can be expected to break as many things as they fix.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - samastur 13y ago
    Nobody complains about death of something they don't use and I think it is a bit early to tell if actual users will complain.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    It's quite different honestly. Google is a services company, and they make you eat advertising everyday to support their products. Ubuntu provides an OS for free (you can turn off the Amazon nonsense anyway) and storage was just an icing on the cake - it was never a key component of their strategy.
    - plywoodtrees 13y ago
      Selling services to users through UbuntuOne was a key component of their strategy at the time it was announced. Source http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-business-strategy http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-..., various statements by Mark Shuttleworth, etc.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Not to mention someone though it would be "User Friendly" to pop up a notification every time a file finished syncing
  - theintern 13y ago
    Dropbox does this for me on Ubuntu? I think it stems from the 'Linux' way of doing things, which is to give as much information as possible, I like it, but I can see how it's off putting to some people.
    - riffraff 13y ago
      dropbox does this for me on a Mac.
    - raverbashing 13y ago
      Humm I had used their client on Linux (and Windows) but I don't remember that (or I deactivated) There's the icon overlay sure, but not a popup or anything.
- mylons 13y ago
  or you could always try Fedora at this point. Ubuntu has never worked out of the box like the latest Fedora, and doesn't come with all the bloatware
  - a124556 13y ago
    I would but I love APT. I'll just stick to Debian Testing.
    - cones688 13y ago
      > I would but I love APT As a near 100% RHEL/Fedora user I am always wondering if there is anything but a material difference between apt and yum? From using Ubuntu extensively a few years ago they seem to have near identical feature set?
      - pjc50 13y ago
        Both have a dependency system, but they are quite different in how they work and resolve dependencies. Apt/dpkg is also a lot more careful about its treatment of configuration files. Debian packages generally ask questions during preconfigure, build a config file, and then run out of the box. But if you already have a config file it will either be left alone or ask you to resolve the merge. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/634/what-are-the-pros-cons-of-deb-vs-rpm http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/634/what-are-the-pro...
      - Crito 13y ago
        Only differences that I have noticed and cared about as a home user: Yum lets you do `yum search` but Apt splits that off with `apt-cache` (this is annoying because with yum I can just swap out that 'search' with my line editor). Apt tends to be faster for equivalent operations.
        bashinator 13y ago
        dpkg -S /some/file # tells you what package provides that file dpkg -L some-package # lists all the files provided by a package apt-get search <regex> # lists all package names matching <regex>
- jodi 13y ago
  Microsoft Skydrive launched in 2007, around a year before Dropbox.
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    Skydrive's genesis was Foldershare (I think it was Foldershare --> Windows Live Folders --> Windows Live Mesh --> Skydrive), which launched in 2002.
    - forgotAgain 13y ago
      Skydrive -> OneDrive
  - etfb 13y ago
    Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the product ready to go. Certainly they didn't push it as hard as Dropbox did; I didn't notice it existed until I started seeing it activated by default in Win8.
sz4kerto 13y ago
"Today we are announcing plans to shut down the Ubuntu One file services. This is a tough decision, particularly when our users rely so heavily on the functionality that Ubuntu One provides" Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down? If no, then why do you say they rely on it? I believe they don't rely on it. "The Ubuntu One file services will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and the Ubuntu One apps in older versions of Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu, Google, and Apple stores will be updated appropriately. The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted." 1.5 months? Really?
- eli 13y ago
  It's entirely plausible that the people using it rely on it heavily, but that there aren't enough people using it to justify its existence.
- oddevan 13y ago
  > Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down? If no, then why do you say they rely on it? From the article: > Additionally, the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage. In other words, they can't compete with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and whatever flavor of the week is next week. It's a distraction, so they're focusing on making the OS better and getting out of the cloud storage business. They can probably tell that there are people who rely on it (active usage logs and all that), and to those people this is a Big Deal. But those are also the people that would be underserved by U1 going forward, so it's best if they get out now.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    If there are people who really use it heavily, then they should give them at least 6 months, I believe. Especially because without further development efforts, just maintaining the service can't be _that_ expensive.
Dewie 13y ago
I set up a daily backup with Ubuntu One just yesterday. Oh well. A USB pendrive should do the trick.
oconnor663 13y ago
"we continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform" "We will calculate the refund amount from today’s announcement, even though the service will remain available until 1 June and data available for a further two months." Very respectable.
tedchs 13y ago
Oh no, Ubuntu is shutting down a service despite "our users rely so heavily on the functionality"... clearly this means we must never trust Ubuntu again! At least that's what people on HN say every time other companies launch something new.
jacquesm 13y ago
That's about as classy a product shutdown as you could wish for. Pity this didn't work out financially for Canonical, and too bad for those users that came to rely on it (but this is the issue with pretty much any service that you don't operate yourself).
- josephlord 13y ago
  > That's about as classy a product shutdown as you could wish for. 2 months continued service and another 2 months data access. It could be worse but it is a long way from the best you could wish for. 12 months to 2 years after the announcement would be what I would hope for from a big company winding up a service
psibi 13y ago
I never liked their storage service. On top of that, all the videos files which I stored in their server got lost previously, so I never cared to use their service again. It just showed the filename of the video and displayed it's size as zero bytes. A quick google at that time showed me that other peoples had also lost their files and Ubuntu didn't even send a apology mail for that. (But text files was present.)
- danford 13y ago
  Are you 100% sure it was Canonical's fault? I've had issues with dropbox, google drive and sky drive at different points in the past and never received an apology letter from any of those companies either. A simple google search will show literally thousands of people having trouble with all sorts of Microsoft services. I sure hope they get apology letters.
mariocesar 13y ago
This is so bad, I deployed my sites using Ubuntu One. However I'm very grateful they decided to opensource it, at least I have a hope to keep implementing it.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Silver lining in the cloud (sorry could not resist) why don't you optimise for site deployment and then resell the service?
  - mariocesar 13y ago
    I'm thinking on that, not sure if it's worth it. Surely I will like to open source it, is just a 17Kb script that keeps listening and add a permission layer to create directories
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      Time your code release so it coincides with Ubuntu One appearing wherever and piggy back on the Web interest. Timely blog post about how you plan to replace Ubuntu One.
tdobson 13y ago
Bye Bye UbuntuOne. You should have been OwnCloud, not a Dropbox wannabe.
- jkh123 13y ago
  This! I welcome the step. It is more tha about time to move away from centralized Services. Hope more will follow.
levosmetalo 13y ago
I glad they did this finally. It was getting really annoying not being able to easily disable the thing in stock Ubuntu.
lawl 13y ago
Very awesome that they release the code. I wish all companies would open source code they don't use anymore. I mean it really doesn't cost anything pushing your old code in a github repo or something.
- davidcollantes 13y ago
  Where is the code?
  - beachwood23 13y ago
    They use Launchpad.net to host their code. It's here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone
    - DoubleMalt 13y ago
      But there is no code for the server component. Only for the clients.
  - jschulenklopper 13y ago
    Don't think the server code is available as open source right now. The statement was: > Additionally, we continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform. So you might expect that they are (or will be) preparing for an open source code release shortly. A move with class, BTW.
- Touche 13y ago
  Troubling that Ubuntu One wasn't already open source. Can anyone explain to me why every cloud drive is using their own proprietary protocols to do the same thing? Why we have to install a different client for each vendor? That's one thing that annoys me greatly, and I'll never use Dropbox as long as its syncing tool is proprietary. Does anyone else remember when companies were proud that they were the custodians of a file format? Once things went to the internet it seems like that stuff is no longer important to companies.
silveira 13y ago
It never worked well with me.
rkalla 13y ago
Did the timelines seem awfully aggressive to anyone? (June 1 service stops, July 31 all data is erased) For a service that we were suppose to be syncing our lives to, that seems like a really abrupt, customer unfriendly ramp-down. I would have expected something more like: 1. April 1 - no new accounts. 2. May 1 - can no longer add files to your existing account. 3. May - Dec - nagged/reminded constantly to pull your files down. 4. Dec 31 - All accounts closed, data "erased" 5. [BONUS] March '15 - Data actually erased to provide a few months of emergency recovery for the few folks that didn't know and are emailing frantically that their family photos are up there.
- reidrac 13y ago
  Apparently that's for free users, for annual subscribers "[...] the service will remain available until 1 June and data available for a further two months". Not that it changes things a lot, but two months is definitely better than one. They probably have data to back their decision. EDIT: I misread the post, there's not difference. Sorry for the noise.
  - claudius 13y ago
    1 June through 31 July is two months?
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      61 days inclusive. I imagine the sync client will be producing a countdown in notification area and generally nagging the user each day. Disclaimer: not an Ubuntu One user.
    - reidrac 13y ago
      You're right, thanks. I misread the blog post.
- jonknee 13y ago
  Almost everyone will have at least one completely up-to-date copy of their files. It's just a matter of signing up for a competing service and re-uploading. Four months seems like a long enough time to accomplish that.
codva 13y ago
I often found that music on their music service was a buck an album cheaper than Amazon.
- JoelOtter 13y ago
  It was just a wrapper for 7digital, I think; you can still buy from there.
shrikant 13y ago
I was (and still am) honestly baffled that Canonical never went about building and marketing Ubuntu One as a home directory backup service. Maybe automatically encrypt and backup all text files in the home directory by default, and for free. Restore encrypted backup from Ubuntu One every time a user does a reinstall or upgrade. Charge users if they want to throw in media files or binaries.
- voyou 13y ago
  The standard Ubuntu install includes Deja Dup, which does encrypted backups to Ubuntu One. I don't remember ever seeing much marketing of this feature from Canonical, though.
  - izacus 13y ago
    Deja-Dup however was rather buggy... for my machines it corrupted all backups I had and I had to restore data from duplicitys broken indexes for at least two more people. A rather bad track record for software that is there to prevent you from losing data :/
    - berdario 13y ago
      Agree, I got corrupted backup data as well, and DejaDup failed to restore a single file from a directory (but the file was actually backedp up correctly, so I managed to recover it by restoring the WHOLE disk backup on another volume and fetching it from there) On top of that, also the backup process itself was unbearably slow... I really wanted a backup tool built upon inotify, so now I'm using Crashplan (it's not open source, but at least it works on linux)
    - nisa 13y ago
      It's unfortunately not an exception rather than yet another indication that they need to spend some energy on polishing things and fixing bugs. At least critical one... Ubuntu is really terrible at that.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pawelkomarnicki 13y ago
No biggie
IgorPartola 13y ago
I for one (no pun intended) actually liked Ubuntu One. In the age where the DropBox installer for Ubuntu was funky and running it headless involved downloading a Python script and running it in a screen session Ubuntu One provided a much better experience. That said, I was never one to pay for DropBox or Ubuntu One because their pricing was just a little too expensive. The free tier got me enough space to share a few random files, and if I needed more than a few GB's, I've got my own infrastructure for that.
amolgupta 13y ago
this is sad. I used ubuntu one services for a while and also cloned the music app code to understand android development once.
derekp7 13y ago
Wouldn't it be better if they partnered with someone like DropBox to provide a migration path? Possibly a transparent migration path? Then convert Ubuntu One to a relabeled version of DropBox.
spektom 13y ago
Well... this is sad. I used to store my config files like .vimrc, vim/, .screenrc etc. in Ubuntu One.
- jarek 13y ago
  private git repo on bitbucket is a decent alternative
tyleregeto 13y ago
I'm one of the heavy users of this. It integrates with all my devices better than other options. Google Still hasn't released a Linux client and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu. I've set my phone camera pics auto sync to all my devices. All my music and photos are backed up with Ubuntu One. When I upgrade my OS version, I sync all important files here. When I switched jobs late last year, my music was instantly available at my new office. When I'm working and I need a file on my Windows machine, I just throw it in Ubuntu One and switch keyboards. I'm disappointed by this, but not surprised. They haven't been doing anything with the product in a long time. I had hoped that just meant it was a stable product.
- izietto 13y ago
  I'm in the your boat too, it's really a pity
- lucianp 13y ago
  Same here. I have been using Ubuntu One file services extensively on a free account while at university to backup my assignments, projects and whatnot. I used the service because for me it was better than the Dropbox app and it integrated nicely in Unity (though that could have changed in the mean time, I haven't checked it in a while). This being said, it did have its warts (for example sometimes when uploading a file the app hung for no reason; there was even one time when I had some files reverted to an older version). I understand their decision and I think it is better to discontinue a service than to keep it running without improving it. I guess it's time to switch...
- jafaku 13y ago
  > and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu What do you mean? I used it for years on both Ubuntu and Fedora, never had an issue.
  - dgrant 13y ago
    Same here, no issues for me on several machines, for several years.
  - 13y ago
Piskvorrr 13y ago
It's good to be periodically reminded that "FREE! FOREVER! CLOUDCLOUDCLOUD!" is hot air.
mindstab 13y ago
Maybe the NSA came for their files and they don't want to shill on their users but also got one of those security letters so they can't say anything about it. Maybe this is a heroic move for us against the US government and we'll never know. Might explain the hasty timetable too.
- weego 13y ago
  A business we like does something we don't like: the NSA probably caused it. Maybe companies are just capable of doing things we like and don't like and our liking them is just a cognitive bias of our historical cherry-picking of good things over bad.
  - mindstab 13y ago
    Actually I'm quite ambivalent about it, I never used ubuntuOne. The problem is there is now precedent for this, and it's all secret. We can't know one way or the other about this or a ton of other stuff. It's more a comment that the NSA has thrown up a huge amount of uncertainty about a lot of things and you can now second guess so many things. And that sucks.
glutamate 13y ago
"Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more" I guess a server OS is also not a strategic priority. Oh well. What is a good Debian-based server OS that is a bit more up-to-date than Debian (and also a strategic priority for its developer)?
- icebraining 13y ago
  Have you tried Debian + backports?
  - glutamate 13y ago
    I haven't, and that seems interesting. But that still means stuck with sysvinit.
    - pjc50 13y ago
      Sysvinit is the UNIX way. Besides, if it's a server, you start everything once and leave it running. Reboot time is not important, only reboot reliability.
- jcastro 13y ago
  Server/Cloud OS is absolutely one of our top priorities, I'll ask to have the blog post updated.
- jff 13y ago
  Just use Debian Testing. If you find a "Debian-based server OS that is a bit more up-to-date", odds are they're just repackaging testing or unstable anyway.
shanemhansen 13y ago
I find the second paragraph disappointing, but unsurprising. "Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more." My hope is that the next design fad that out-fads the current "make my 30 inch high-res monitor look like a 3 inch screen" fad will be a step back towards actual usability. Convergence is a usability nightmare. I'd rant more, but hey this is free software so I'll just switch to another distro. viva la divergence.
- pekk 13y ago
  I don't understand why you would choose a distribution based on a vague "strategic priority" statement you found on some web page rather than any technical reason. Maybe you just meant to complain about Unity for the 4 millionth instance on HN?
  - derefr 13y ago
    I think it might be the seeming similarity to Microsoft's "strategic priority", which resulted in the W8 Metro UI.
laxk 13y ago
What I can use as an alternative for Ubuntu One?
- tomswartz07 13y ago
  ownCloud is pretty awesome. It's like a self-hosted version of Dropbox. All open source, too. https://github.com/owncloud/ https://github.com/owncloud/ Check out their main page as well: http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/
goshawk 13y ago
Fair... It was never their core business and never skyrocketed. And I'm a heavily user of the service. Any other good alternative, maybe FOSS, except Dropbox?
- tomswartz07 13y ago
  ownCloud is pretty awesome. It's like a self-hosted version of Dropbox. All open source, too. https://github.com/owncloud/ https://github.com/owncloud/
  - goshawk 13y ago
    Thank you! going to see it it has a handly client i can install and it takes care of syncing...
    - tomswartz07 13y ago
      Yep! Mirall is the client (full disclosure, I'm a pseudo-team member working with this client's development) and the server software would also be needed. Check out http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/ for the full info on getting it set up! :)
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    Its security track isn't that awesome, though. And same is lack of differential uploads (change a single byte in a gigabyte blob, get the whole gigabyte re-uploaded).
bluedino 13y ago
I can see disabling new signups but not shutting the service down and erasing everyone's data - it doesn't bode well for Ubuntu in the enterprise or anywhere else trust and longevity are important.
- pekk 13y ago
  That's a stretch. This has really nothing to do with the suitability of Ubuntu the distro or Canonical the company for "the enterprise."
celerity 13y ago
Thank you! Ubuntu One is a buggy, laggy mess and frankly an embarrassment to Canonical. What would be neat is if they made a GUI for BTSync, and sold pre-configured hard drive space for it!
- pandeiro 13y ago
  Exactly. I am as big a Canonical fan as they come, but the UX for Ubuntu One was so bad it bordered on unusable. One time I needed to make something around 5 GB publicly available, and since Dropbox's free plan was too small, I used Ubuntu One. Only after two days' worth of painful, oft-restarted uploading did I discover they require logging in to access publicly available files. This is a mercy killing.
kermit666 13y ago
How can I self-host Ubuntu One? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047
juanuys 13y ago
Perhaps they can use their freed-up resources to nudge Google along with the Drive client for Linux: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en "Running Linux? Stay tuned - Drive for Linux isn't ready just yet."
dayjah 13y ago
We have entered the age of the storage wars.... The price cuts from Google last week were clearly an offensive move in this space. One of the best ways to refine a market is to run it at sustainable loss and watch those that cannot compete die off. Credit to Canonical for failing fast here. I hope they decide to reassess the situation and provide tooling for a BYOCS[1]-esque abstraction. This'll permit users to roll their data from one cloud storage company to another as they all start dropping off. As a somewhat related aside: where is amazon in the consumer commodity SaaS world? No email, no calendar, no storage (albeit they do provide mp3 storage). Do they just have no interest in providing these user services? [1] Bring Your Own Cloud Storage
Dewie 13y ago
I am trying to install Ubuntu One now. Just to see what happens. It tries to install but then gives a "The application has closed unexpectedly". Are people who have Ubuntu One installed being notified? I backup with Ubuntu One and haven't got any 'imminent shutdown' messages.
afhsfsfdsss88 13y ago
I imagine this service had a low adoption rate and is costing Canonical money at a time when Mark is putting all his eggs in the phone/pc convergence basket.
macco 13y ago
To be honest. Ubuntu One never worked for me. Dropbox is a much better alternative. What are other alternatives to Ubuntu One? If they are smart, the partner with dropbox.
- pekk 13y ago
  Dropbox, whose employees see all your files. Which fact people keep forgetting and rediscovering on an annual basis.
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
This possibility was the reason I never bothered to even consider Ubuntu One as a file locker.
petrel 13y ago
Thank God. It was a pathetic service and it was an adventure to solve the captcha used while creating a new account.
frade33 13y ago
This is tragic and I am baffled how flawed their argument is. >Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more If Ubuntu One wasn't of their strategic priorities, then certainly they didn't have their priorities right.
aswanson 13y ago
Funny thing...just yesterday I was just considering opening an account with them and Tarsnap as a dual-strategy backup-of-backup.
yason 13y ago
I've loved Ubuntu One for years. This is too sad, I would've wanted to have Ubuntu use it automatically for all kinds of things such as home directory backups etc. Are there any good open-source self-hosted options that I could run on my little box at home? Preferably something that doesn't require a special setup or deployment on a server. I could imagine there are file-sync solutions that just need an operable SSH account somewhere and merely automate the use of rsync to do the transfers, watching files and taking care of conflicts.
- zorlem 13y ago
  Depending on your needs you might check git-annex, unison and others mentioned in other comments.
paradite 13y ago
Considering the fact that Ubuntu breaks sometimes on laptops, a online storage for backing up important files had been a good service for me. Now that it will be down, I have to configure some 3rd party software in order to get the automatic backup process. On a brighter side, I feel the Ubuntu on my laptop is getting more and more stable(no breaking for past few month in fact), so online backup may not seem that necessary now for me.
happybeing 13y ago
Anyone interested in porting the Ubuntu One code onto a new free, open source decentralized cloud network? The spec is amazing, including client side encryption, fully anonymous, no single point of failure, no way for the network to be censored or shut down etc. If interested check out [MaidSafe.net](http://maidsafe.net http://maidsafe.net) for overview, and if you want to talk code join us on maidsafe-developers Google Group. It's launching soon and it would be fantastic to have a Ubuntu One government as one of the first apps!
randunel 13y ago
The only reason it's not sustainable anymore is because send-all-my-searches-to-Amazon will be opt-in, so they will have to start paying for s3. The deal where Amazon would give away cloud storage for OS-level privacy has changes since they announced the opt-in.
72deluxe 13y ago
Hurray for cloud services! Let's chuck all of our microcomputers in the bin, with their massive amounts of RAM and cheap store. Cloud forever!
Mikeb85 13y ago
This is disappointing. I have all my backup files on Ubuntu One, and I've purchased extra storage as well. Between various bugs, shit that just plain doesn't work, cancelled projects and now Ubuntu One, it seems Canonical likes shooting themselves in the foot... Maybe if they had actually marketed Ubuntu One and made it better they could be a Dropbox competitor. Then again, maybe they just don't have the expertise to make half of this shit work. No wonder SUSE is a billion dollar company, Red Hat a multi-billion dollar company (with over a billion in yearly revenue), and Canonical a trust fund baby...
igravious 13y ago
Canonical should buy Dropbox and integrate. That'd give others (The Goog, AAPL, MSFT) pause for thought and give the Ubuntu folk a key differentiator versus the other Linux Distros. If they can't afford it they should figure out how to afford it. Beg, borrow or steal :) That's my .02€
- brongondwana 13y ago
  They'll need a lot of people at .02€ to kickstarter[1] their way to pay $10bn[2]. [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge [2] http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd10bn-as-stock-market-flotation-is-discussed http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd...
ta_ackack 13y ago
It was expected this kind of ubuntu branded services were not going to last long. From its early beginning ubuntu has been pointed out for lacking a foreseeable long term future, being a nice experiment funded by a donation from the personal fortune of a rich guy,which will eventually run out. Ubuntu one felt like an experimentation from Ubuntu to bring some money in, in hope to somehow contribute money to fund itself for lack of a better business model. It makes sense to kill the experimentations that don't bring enough profit while consuming precious resources.
ta_ackack 13y ago
It was expected this kind of ubuntu branded services were not going to last long. From its early beginning ubuntu has been pointed out for lacking a foreseeable long term future, being a nice experiment funded by a donation from the personal fortune of a rich guy,which will eventually run out. Ubuntu one felt like an experimentation from Ubuntu to bring some money in, in hope to somehow contribute money to fund itself for lack of a better business model. It makes sense to kill the experimentations that don't bring enough profit while consuming precious resources.

298 points by endijs 13y ago

etfb 13y ago

That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading themselves too thin.

skc 13y ago
This is the first I'm hearing of Skydrive being considered a failure. What is that based on exactly?
- dnissley 13y ago
  I think he was saying that it, too, was a bandwagon feature. Not that it was a failure.
- etfb 13y ago
  Hearts and minds. It's a free product and installed and activated (and pushed!) by default in Win8, as far as I can see, so you can't really measure success, but I would estimate one in three non-tech-savvy people I talk to understand what Dropbox is, and maybe one in fifty understand what SkyDrive is. So I'd call it a failure without too much hesitation.
ekianjo 13y ago
Yeah, and honestly the setup in early versions was horrible. I tried so many times to make it work and gave up in the end. They shouldn't have released it so early back then when it was obviously not production ready.
- tomswartz07 13y ago
  I agree. I just logged in to see my files and pull anything if necessary. Looks like the last time files were changed was Sept of 2009. Obviously, I haven't used it since then.
- TylerE 13y ago
  This approach to things is what killed Ubuntu (yes, killed, not is killing). See PulseAudio, Unity, etc
  - gtaylor 13y ago
    Why does PulseAudio have anything to do with Ubuntu? AFAIK, there is no relation between the two, other than the fact that Ubuntu offers PulseAudio (along with almost every other distro).
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      I must admit that, more than once, an Ubuntu upgrade killed my audio and I had to go and fix it myself. It's really painful that a distro that wants to be number 1 is so broken at times.
      - tomswartz07 13y ago
        I don't think it's more that they push non-prod ready packages (yes, they do) but the fact that their update model doesn't easily allow them to fix bugs from upstream. The vast majority of the packages in Ubuntu (more notably in the LTS releases) are all custom patched by Ubu-devs. Rather than taking the raw package and pushing it through, they have a semi-opaque method of testing, patching, and then releasing to the greater community. I've tried several times to get an 'in' so that I could help with the process, but it seems to me like a 'club hangout' where outsiders are slightly discouraged. :(
        makomk 13y ago
        In the case of PulseAudio, there are no stable upstream releases, so distros basically have to backport fixes themselves in order to get working audio. Red Hat (who fund most of the development) do the same. New upstream versions come with new features and can be expected to break as many things as they fix.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- samastur 13y ago
  Nobody complains about death of something they don't use and I think it is a bit early to tell if actual users will complain.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  It's quite different honestly. Google is a services company, and they make you eat advertising everyday to support their products. Ubuntu provides an OS for free (you can turn off the Amazon nonsense anyway) and storage was just an icing on the cake - it was never a key component of their strategy.
  - plywoodtrees 13y ago
    Selling services to users through UbuntuOne was a key component of their strategy at the time it was announced. Source http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-business-strategy http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/rethinking-canonical039s-ubuntu-..., various statements by Mark Shuttleworth, etc.
raverbashing 13y ago
Not to mention someone though it would be "User Friendly" to pop up a notification every time a file finished syncing
- theintern 13y ago
  Dropbox does this for me on Ubuntu? I think it stems from the 'Linux' way of doing things, which is to give as much information as possible, I like it, but I can see how it's off putting to some people.
  - riffraff 13y ago
    dropbox does this for me on a Mac.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    Humm I had used their client on Linux (and Windows) but I don't remember that (or I deactivated) There's the icon overlay sure, but not a popup or anything.
mylons 13y ago
or you could always try Fedora at this point. Ubuntu has never worked out of the box like the latest Fedora, and doesn't come with all the bloatware
- a124556 13y ago
  I would but I love APT. I'll just stick to Debian Testing.
  - cones688 13y ago
    > I would but I love APT As a near 100% RHEL/Fedora user I am always wondering if there is anything but a material difference between apt and yum? From using Ubuntu extensively a few years ago they seem to have near identical feature set?
    - pjc50 13y ago
      Both have a dependency system, but they are quite different in how they work and resolve dependencies. Apt/dpkg is also a lot more careful about its treatment of configuration files. Debian packages generally ask questions during preconfigure, build a config file, and then run out of the box. But if you already have a config file it will either be left alone or ask you to resolve the merge. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/634/what-are-the-pros-cons-of-deb-vs-rpm http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/634/what-are-the-pro...
    - Crito 13y ago
      Only differences that I have noticed and cared about as a home user: Yum lets you do `yum search` but Apt splits that off with `apt-cache` (this is annoying because with yum I can just swap out that 'search' with my line editor). Apt tends to be faster for equivalent operations.
      - bashinator 13y ago
        dpkg -S /some/file # tells you what package provides that file dpkg -L some-package # lists all the files provided by a package apt-get search <regex> # lists all package names matching <regex>
jodi 13y ago
Microsoft Skydrive launched in 2007, around a year before Dropbox.
- bentcorner 13y ago
  Skydrive's genesis was Foldershare (I think it was Foldershare --> Windows Live Folders --> Windows Live Mesh --> Skydrive), which launched in 2002.
  - forgotAgain 13y ago
    Skydrive -> OneDrive
- etfb 13y ago
  Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the product ready to go. Certainly they didn't push it as hard as Dropbox did; I didn't notice it existed until I started seeing it activated by default in Win8.

sz4kerto 13y ago

"Today we are announcing plans to shut down the Ubuntu One file services. This is a tough decision, particularly when our users rely so heavily on the functionality that Ubuntu One provides" Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down? If no, then why do you say they rely on it? I believe they don't rely on it. "The Ubuntu One file services will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and the Ubuntu One apps in older versions of Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu, Google, and Apple stores will be updated appropriately. The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted." 1.5 months? Really?

eli 13y ago
It's entirely plausible that the people using it rely on it heavily, but that there aren't enough people using it to justify its existence.
oddevan 13y ago
> Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down? If no, then why do you say they rely on it? From the article: > Additionally, the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage. In other words, they can't compete with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and whatever flavor of the week is next week. It's a distraction, so they're focusing on making the OS better and getting out of the cloud storage business. They can probably tell that there are people who rely on it (active usage logs and all that), and to those people this is a Big Deal. But those are also the people that would be underserved by U1 going forward, so it's best if they get out now.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  If there are people who really use it heavily, then they should give them at least 6 months, I believe. Especially because without further development efforts, just maintaining the service can't be _that_ expensive.

Dewie 13y ago

I set up a daily backup with Ubuntu One just yesterday. Oh well. A USB pendrive should do the trick.

oconnor663 13y ago

"we continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform" "We will calculate the refund amount from today’s announcement, even though the service will remain available until 1 June and data available for a further two months." Very respectable.

tedchs 13y ago

Oh no, Ubuntu is shutting down a service despite "our users rely so heavily on the functionality"... clearly this means we must never trust Ubuntu again! At least that's what people on HN say every time other companies launch something new.

jacquesm 13y ago

That's about as classy a product shutdown as you could wish for. Pity this didn't work out financially for Canonical, and too bad for those users that came to rely on it (but this is the issue with pretty much any service that you don't operate yourself).

josephlord 13y ago
> That's about as classy a product shutdown as you could wish for. 2 months continued service and another 2 months data access. It could be worse but it is a long way from the best you could wish for. 12 months to 2 years after the announcement would be what I would hope for from a big company winding up a service

psibi 13y ago

I never liked their storage service. On top of that, all the videos files which I stored in their server got lost previously, so I never cared to use their service again. It just showed the filename of the video and displayed it's size as zero bytes. A quick google at that time showed me that other peoples had also lost their files and Ubuntu didn't even send a apology mail for that. (But text files was present.)

danford 13y ago
Are you 100% sure it was Canonical's fault? I've had issues with dropbox, google drive and sky drive at different points in the past and never received an apology letter from any of those companies either. A simple google search will show literally thousands of people having trouble with all sorts of Microsoft services. I sure hope they get apology letters.

mariocesar 13y ago

This is so bad, I deployed my sites using Ubuntu One. However I'm very grateful they decided to opensource it, at least I have a hope to keep implementing it.

keithpeter 13y ago
Silver lining in the cloud (sorry could not resist) why don't you optimise for site deployment and then resell the service?
- mariocesar 13y ago
  I'm thinking on that, not sure if it's worth it. Surely I will like to open source it, is just a 17Kb script that keeps listening and add a permission layer to create directories
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    Time your code release so it coincides with Ubuntu One appearing wherever and piggy back on the Web interest. Timely blog post about how you plan to replace Ubuntu One.

tdobson 13y ago

Bye Bye UbuntuOne. You should have been OwnCloud, not a Dropbox wannabe.

jkh123 13y ago
This! I welcome the step. It is more tha about time to move away from centralized Services. Hope more will follow.

levosmetalo 13y ago

I glad they did this finally. It was getting really annoying not being able to easily disable the thing in stock Ubuntu.

lawl 13y ago

Very awesome that they release the code. I wish all companies would open source code they don't use anymore. I mean it really doesn't cost anything pushing your old code in a github repo or something.

davidcollantes 13y ago
Where is the code?
- beachwood23 13y ago
  They use Launchpad.net to host their code. It's here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone
  - DoubleMalt 13y ago
    But there is no code for the server component. Only for the clients.
- jschulenklopper 13y ago
  Don't think the server code is available as open source right now. The statement was: > Additionally, we continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform. So you might expect that they are (or will be) preparing for an open source code release shortly. A move with class, BTW.
Touche 13y ago
Troubling that Ubuntu One wasn't already open source. Can anyone explain to me why every cloud drive is using their own proprietary protocols to do the same thing? Why we have to install a different client for each vendor? That's one thing that annoys me greatly, and I'll never use Dropbox as long as its syncing tool is proprietary. Does anyone else remember when companies were proud that they were the custodians of a file format? Once things went to the internet it seems like that stuff is no longer important to companies.

silveira 13y ago

It never worked well with me.

rkalla 13y ago

Did the timelines seem awfully aggressive to anyone? (June 1 service stops, July 31 all data is erased) For a service that we were suppose to be syncing our lives to, that seems like a really abrupt, customer unfriendly ramp-down. I would have expected something more like: 1. April 1 - no new accounts. 2. May 1 - can no longer add files to your existing account. 3. May - Dec - nagged/reminded constantly to pull your files down. 4. Dec 31 - All accounts closed, data "erased" 5. [BONUS] March '15 - Data actually erased to provide a few months of emergency recovery for the few folks that didn't know and are emailing frantically that their family photos are up there.

reidrac 13y ago
Apparently that's for free users, for annual subscribers "[...] the service will remain available until 1 June and data available for a further two months". Not that it changes things a lot, but two months is definitely better than one. They probably have data to back their decision. EDIT: I misread the post, there's not difference. Sorry for the noise.
- claudius 13y ago
  1 June through 31 July is two months?
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    61 days inclusive. I imagine the sync client will be producing a countdown in notification area and generally nagging the user each day. Disclaimer: not an Ubuntu One user.
  - reidrac 13y ago
    You're right, thanks. I misread the blog post.
jonknee 13y ago
Almost everyone will have at least one completely up-to-date copy of their files. It's just a matter of signing up for a competing service and re-uploading. Four months seems like a long enough time to accomplish that.

codva 13y ago

I often found that music on their music service was a buck an album cheaper than Amazon.

JoelOtter 13y ago
It was just a wrapper for 7digital, I think; you can still buy from there.

shrikant 13y ago

I was (and still am) honestly baffled that Canonical never went about building and marketing Ubuntu One as a home directory backup service. Maybe automatically encrypt and backup all text files in the home directory by default, and for free. Restore encrypted backup from Ubuntu One every time a user does a reinstall or upgrade. Charge users if they want to throw in media files or binaries.

voyou 13y ago
The standard Ubuntu install includes Deja Dup, which does encrypted backups to Ubuntu One. I don't remember ever seeing much marketing of this feature from Canonical, though.
- izacus 13y ago
  Deja-Dup however was rather buggy... for my machines it corrupted all backups I had and I had to restore data from duplicitys broken indexes for at least two more people. A rather bad track record for software that is there to prevent you from losing data :/
  - berdario 13y ago
    Agree, I got corrupted backup data as well, and DejaDup failed to restore a single file from a directory (but the file was actually backedp up correctly, so I managed to recover it by restoring the WHOLE disk backup on another volume and fetching it from there) On top of that, also the backup process itself was unbearably slow... I really wanted a backup tool built upon inotify, so now I'm using Crashplan (it's not open source, but at least it works on linux)
  - nisa 13y ago
    It's unfortunately not an exception rather than yet another indication that they need to spend some energy on polishing things and fixing bugs. At least critical one... Ubuntu is really terrible at that.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pawelkomarnicki 13y ago

No biggie

IgorPartola 13y ago

I for one (no pun intended) actually liked Ubuntu One. In the age where the DropBox installer for Ubuntu was funky and running it headless involved downloading a Python script and running it in a screen session Ubuntu One provided a much better experience. That said, I was never one to pay for DropBox or Ubuntu One because their pricing was just a little too expensive. The free tier got me enough space to share a few random files, and if I needed more than a few GB's, I've got my own infrastructure for that.

amolgupta 13y ago

this is sad. I used ubuntu one services for a while and also cloned the music app code to understand android development once.

derekp7 13y ago

Wouldn't it be better if they partnered with someone like DropBox to provide a migration path? Possibly a transparent migration path? Then convert Ubuntu One to a relabeled version of DropBox.

spektom 13y ago

Well... this is sad. I used to store my config files like .vimrc, vim/, .screenrc etc. in Ubuntu One.

jarek 13y ago
private git repo on bitbucket is a decent alternative

tyleregeto 13y ago

I'm one of the heavy users of this. It integrates with all my devices better than other options. Google Still hasn't released a Linux client and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu. I've set my phone camera pics auto sync to all my devices. All my music and photos are backed up with Ubuntu One. When I upgrade my OS version, I sync all important files here. When I switched jobs late last year, my music was instantly available at my new office. When I'm working and I need a file on my Windows machine, I just throw it in Ubuntu One and switch keyboards. I'm disappointed by this, but not surprised. They haven't been doing anything with the product in a long time. I had hoped that just meant it was a stable product.

izietto 13y ago
I'm in the your boat too, it's really a pity
lucianp 13y ago
Same here. I have been using Ubuntu One file services extensively on a free account while at university to backup my assignments, projects and whatnot. I used the service because for me it was better than the Dropbox app and it integrated nicely in Unity (though that could have changed in the mean time, I haven't checked it in a while). This being said, it did have its warts (for example sometimes when uploading a file the app hung for no reason; there was even one time when I had some files reverted to an older version). I understand their decision and I think it is better to discontinue a service than to keep it running without improving it. I guess it's time to switch...
jafaku 13y ago
> and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu What do you mean? I used it for years on both Ubuntu and Fedora, never had an issue.
- dgrant 13y ago
  Same here, no issues for me on several machines, for several years.
- 13y ago

Piskvorrr 13y ago

It's good to be periodically reminded that "FREE! FOREVER! CLOUDCLOUDCLOUD!" is hot air.

mindstab 13y ago

Maybe the NSA came for their files and they don't want to shill on their users but also got one of those security letters so they can't say anything about it. Maybe this is a heroic move for us against the US government and we'll never know. Might explain the hasty timetable too.

weego 13y ago
A business we like does something we don't like: the NSA probably caused it. Maybe companies are just capable of doing things we like and don't like and our liking them is just a cognitive bias of our historical cherry-picking of good things over bad.
- mindstab 13y ago
  Actually I'm quite ambivalent about it, I never used ubuntuOne. The problem is there is now precedent for this, and it's all secret. We can't know one way or the other about this or a ton of other stuff. It's more a comment that the NSA has thrown up a huge amount of uncertainty about a lot of things and you can now second guess so many things. And that sucks.

glutamate 13y ago

"Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more" I guess a server OS is also not a strategic priority. Oh well. What is a good Debian-based server OS that is a bit more up-to-date than Debian (and also a strategic priority for its developer)?

icebraining 13y ago
Have you tried Debian + backports?
- glutamate 13y ago
  I haven't, and that seems interesting. But that still means stuck with sysvinit.
  - pjc50 13y ago
    Sysvinit is the UNIX way. Besides, if it's a server, you start everything once and leave it running. Reboot time is not important, only reboot reliability.
jcastro 13y ago
Server/Cloud OS is absolutely one of our top priorities, I'll ask to have the blog post updated.
jff 13y ago
Just use Debian Testing. If you find a "Debian-based server OS that is a bit more up-to-date", odds are they're just repackaging testing or unstable anyway.

shanemhansen 13y ago

I find the second paragraph disappointing, but unsurprising. "Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more." My hope is that the next design fad that out-fads the current "make my 30 inch high-res monitor look like a 3 inch screen" fad will be a step back towards actual usability. Convergence is a usability nightmare. I'd rant more, but hey this is free software so I'll just switch to another distro. viva la divergence.

pekk 13y ago
I don't understand why you would choose a distribution based on a vague "strategic priority" statement you found on some web page rather than any technical reason. Maybe you just meant to complain about Unity for the 4 millionth instance on HN?
- derefr 13y ago
  I think it might be the seeming similarity to Microsoft's "strategic priority", which resulted in the W8 Metro UI.

laxk 13y ago

What I can use as an alternative for Ubuntu One?

tomswartz07 13y ago
ownCloud is pretty awesome. It's like a self-hosted version of Dropbox. All open source, too. https://github.com/owncloud/ https://github.com/owncloud/ Check out their main page as well: http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/

goshawk 13y ago

Fair... It was never their core business and never skyrocketed. And I'm a heavily user of the service. Any other good alternative, maybe FOSS, except Dropbox?

tomswartz07 13y ago
ownCloud is pretty awesome. It's like a self-hosted version of Dropbox. All open source, too. https://github.com/owncloud/ https://github.com/owncloud/
- goshawk 13y ago
  Thank you! going to see it it has a handly client i can install and it takes care of syncing...
  - tomswartz07 13y ago
    Yep! Mirall is the client (full disclosure, I'm a pseudo-team member working with this client's development) and the server software would also be needed. Check out http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/ for the full info on getting it set up! :)
- drdaeman 13y ago
  Its security track isn't that awesome, though. And same is lack of differential uploads (change a single byte in a gigabyte blob, get the whole gigabyte re-uploaded).

bluedino 13y ago

I can see disabling new signups but not shutting the service down and erasing everyone's data - it doesn't bode well for Ubuntu in the enterprise or anywhere else trust and longevity are important.

pekk 13y ago
That's a stretch. This has really nothing to do with the suitability of Ubuntu the distro or Canonical the company for "the enterprise."

celerity 13y ago

Thank you! Ubuntu One is a buggy, laggy mess and frankly an embarrassment to Canonical. What would be neat is if they made a GUI for BTSync, and sold pre-configured hard drive space for it!

pandeiro 13y ago
Exactly. I am as big a Canonical fan as they come, but the UX for Ubuntu One was so bad it bordered on unusable. One time I needed to make something around 5 GB publicly available, and since Dropbox's free plan was too small, I used Ubuntu One. Only after two days' worth of painful, oft-restarted uploading did I discover they require logging in to access publicly available files. This is a mercy killing.

kermit666 13y ago

How can I self-host Ubuntu One? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047

juanuys 13y ago

Perhaps they can use their freed-up resources to nudge Google along with the Drive client for Linux: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en "Running Linux? Stay tuned - Drive for Linux isn't ready just yet."

dayjah 13y ago

We have entered the age of the storage wars.... The price cuts from Google last week were clearly an offensive move in this space. One of the best ways to refine a market is to run it at sustainable loss and watch those that cannot compete die off. Credit to Canonical for failing fast here. I hope they decide to reassess the situation and provide tooling for a BYOCS[1]-esque abstraction. This'll permit users to roll their data from one cloud storage company to another as they all start dropping off. As a somewhat related aside: where is amazon in the consumer commodity SaaS world? No email, no calendar, no storage (albeit they do provide mp3 storage). Do they just have no interest in providing these user services? [1] Bring Your Own Cloud Storage

Dewie 13y ago

I am trying to install Ubuntu One now. Just to see what happens. It tries to install but then gives a "The application has closed unexpectedly". Are people who have Ubuntu One installed being notified? I backup with Ubuntu One and haven't got any 'imminent shutdown' messages.

afhsfsfdsss88 13y ago

I imagine this service had a low adoption rate and is costing Canonical money at a time when Mark is putting all his eggs in the phone/pc convergence basket.

macco 13y ago

To be honest. Ubuntu One never worked for me. Dropbox is a much better alternative. What are other alternatives to Ubuntu One? If they are smart, the partner with dropbox.

pekk 13y ago
Dropbox, whose employees see all your files. Which fact people keep forgetting and rediscovering on an annual basis.

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

This possibility was the reason I never bothered to even consider Ubuntu One as a file locker.

petrel 13y ago

Thank God. It was a pathetic service and it was an adventure to solve the captcha used while creating a new account.

frade33 13y ago

This is tragic and I am baffled how flawed their argument is. >Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more If Ubuntu One wasn't of their strategic priorities, then certainly they didn't have their priorities right.

aswanson 13y ago

Funny thing...just yesterday I was just considering opening an account with them and Tarsnap as a dual-strategy backup-of-backup.

yason 13y ago

I've loved Ubuntu One for years. This is too sad, I would've wanted to have Ubuntu use it automatically for all kinds of things such as home directory backups etc. Are there any good open-source self-hosted options that I could run on my little box at home? Preferably something that doesn't require a special setup or deployment on a server. I could imagine there are file-sync solutions that just need an operable SSH account somewhere and merely automate the use of rsync to do the transfers, watching files and taking care of conflicts.

zorlem 13y ago
Depending on your needs you might check git-annex, unison and others mentioned in other comments.

paradite 13y ago

Considering the fact that Ubuntu breaks sometimes on laptops, a online storage for backing up important files had been a good service for me. Now that it will be down, I have to configure some 3rd party software in order to get the automatic backup process. On a brighter side, I feel the Ubuntu on my laptop is getting more and more stable(no breaking for past few month in fact), so online backup may not seem that necessary now for me.

happybeing 13y ago

Anyone interested in porting the Ubuntu One code onto a new free, open source decentralized cloud network? The spec is amazing, including client side encryption, fully anonymous, no single point of failure, no way for the network to be censored or shut down etc. If interested check out [MaidSafe.net](http://maidsafe.net http://maidsafe.net) for overview, and if you want to talk code join us on maidsafe-developers Google Group. It's launching soon and it would be fantastic to have a Ubuntu One government as one of the first apps!

randunel 13y ago

The only reason it's not sustainable anymore is because send-all-my-searches-to-Amazon will be opt-in, so they will have to start paying for s3. The deal where Amazon would give away cloud storage for OS-level privacy has changes since they announced the opt-in.

72deluxe 13y ago

Hurray for cloud services! Let's chuck all of our microcomputers in the bin, with their massive amounts of RAM and cheap store. Cloud forever!

Mikeb85 13y ago

This is disappointing. I have all my backup files on Ubuntu One, and I've purchased extra storage as well. Between various bugs, shit that just plain doesn't work, cancelled projects and now Ubuntu One, it seems Canonical likes shooting themselves in the foot... Maybe if they had actually marketed Ubuntu One and made it better they could be a Dropbox competitor. Then again, maybe they just don't have the expertise to make half of this shit work. No wonder SUSE is a billion dollar company, Red Hat a multi-billion dollar company (with over a billion in yearly revenue), and Canonical a trust fund baby...

igravious 13y ago

Canonical should buy Dropbox and integrate. That'd give others (The Goog, AAPL, MSFT) pause for thought and give the Ubuntu folk a key differentiator versus the other Linux Distros. If they can't afford it they should figure out how to afford it. Beg, borrow or steal :) That's my .02€

brongondwana 13y ago
They'll need a lot of people at .02€ to kickstarter[1] their way to pay $10bn[2]. [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge [2] http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd10bn-as-stock-market-flotation-is-discussed http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd...

ta_ackack 13y ago

It was expected this kind of ubuntu branded services were not going to last long. From its early beginning ubuntu has been pointed out for lacking a foreseeable long term future, being a nice experiment funded by a donation from the personal fortune of a rich guy,which will eventually run out. Ubuntu one felt like an experimentation from Ubuntu to bring some money in, in hope to somehow contribute money to fund itself for lack of a better business model. It makes sense to kill the experimentations that don't bring enough profit while consuming precious resources.

ta_ackack 13y ago