The Ubuntu One Service

It was with little to no fanfare that the “personal cloud” service Ubuntu One was released on May 9th 2009 as an invitation only based beta product by Canonical. The product was released for the Ubuntu 9.04 platform with users requiring an update on their earlier Ubuntu distros to use the new service.

Ubuntu One at the time offered two storage plans: a free 2GB account and a $10/month 10 GB paid service. To make it clear, as if the name didn’t serve as enough of an indicator, this was (and is) an Ubuntu service for the Ubuntu platform only. Established Services such as DropBox and the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) operate in a similar manner; the distinction being the former operates as a multi-platform storage tool and the latter is less geared towards the consumer market.

Since the release of Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS (codename Lucid Lynx), Canonical have upped the Ubuntu One products feature set:

* Sync up to 2 GB of files, contacts, notes, bookmarks, purchased music, and Gwibber broadcast messages

* Automatically sync your digital life to your personal cloud and with all of your computers

* Mobile Contacts Sync

* Mark any directory in your home folder for sync

* Share folders with trusted contacts or publish files to the Internet with convenient short URLs

* Sync purchased songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store

* Integrated with your Ubuntu computer

* Convenient web browser access to your personal cloud

* 50 GB total of storage to sync more of your digital life (paid service only)

The Ubuntu One service utilises the Ubuntu Single Sign On (SSO) mechanism to ease the process of logging in to various Ubuntu sites. If you already have an account for example say, Launchpad, you can use your same credentials here.

Feel free to visit the Ubuntu single sign-on service

Ubuntu One is a built in option on the toolbar of Ubuntu 10.0.4 and can be quickly set up for file and folder synchronisation out of the box:

The Verdict

Having used Ubuntu One for some time now, for personal file synchronisation across different machines and group file/folder synchronisation with other colleagues, I feel it is a service which is brimming with promise but has a little way to be before it becomes falls in line with some of the other polished product offerings from Canonical.

Pros

1. Easy out of the box setup
2. Good integration with the Ubuntu interface (e.g. nautilus)
3. Uses single sign on mechanism with other Ubuntu sites
4. 10GB free account more than adequate for most needs

Cons

1. Synchronisation sometimes gets confused if files/folder are deleted from repository (i.e. conflicts occur)
2. Lack of progress meter on synchronisation leaves user unsure how far through synching they are

 

 

It looks like the ‘pros’ have it!

 

 

The inner workings of the Ubuntu One service are beyond the scope of this article, but for further information, consult the Ubuntu One: Support page

 

 

(The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Creative Internet By Design Ltd)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Creative Internet By Design Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.