
Shutting down Ubuntu One file services - endijs
http://blog.canonical.com/2014/04/02/shutting-down-ubuntu-one-file-services/
======
rkalla
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.

~~~
jonknee
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.

~~~
yaph
It's not only about file storage. Ubuntu One offered a Web service to
programmatically access the files. Imagine you've developed an application
that interfaces with Ubuntu One and is mission critical for your business.

~~~
jarek
Then you've learned a valuable lesson about how to design applications that
are mission critical for your business.

------
etfb
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.

~~~
mylons
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
I would but I love APT. I'll just stick to Debian Testing.

~~~
cones688
> 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?

~~~
Crito
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.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I hope one day there's a command line package manager that works with both
DPKG and RPM. Something tells me that will expose the real reason people stick
with one over the other; remembering the package manager syntax. I feel no
great allegiance to one side or the other, there's nothing of real merit I can
differentiate them on, the only real result of the split is package
maintainers duplicating work.

~~~
twic
I have a set of shell scripts which wrap apt, yum, and macports, so i only
have to remember one set of commands. They only cover a small fraction of what
those tools can do, but they cover 90% of what i do day to day. They were not
at all hard to write.

------
tyleregeto
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.

~~~
jafaku
> 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.

~~~
tyleregeto
To be honest, its been a long time (years) since I've given it a serious try.
I had problems in the top bar, it wouldn't start up properly, often freezing,
and I would get errors frequently trying to access it. I don't know if these
errors were with the drop box client or on my end.

------
sz4kerto
"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?

~~~
oddevan
> 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.

~~~
toyg
It's funny because the origins of Ubuntu One were a clear attempt at getting
some SAAS money. Finding revenue streams has always been an issue for Linux
distributions, especially consumer-oriented ones like Ubuntu, and UbuntuOne
was yet another stab at the problem. Then they found that it's hard to compete
in SAAS against giants like Microsoft and Google, where that sort of service
is often a commodity driving profits in other areas. Focused companies like
Dropbox can do it, but if your focus is elsewhere, then you don't have a
chance.

I wonder what they'll try next.

~~~
gamerdonkey
Canonical does seem to have more trouble finding reliable revenue streams.
This is probably due to their focus on more end-user-oriented support and
features. Among the Linux distro 'major players', though, they're kind of the
odd ones out. RedHat and SUSE have been doing pretty well for themselves.

[http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/linux-
profitabili...](http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/linux-
profitability-how-successful-are-companies-behind-biggest-versions-linux)

~~~
toyg
RedHat and SuSe are both oriented towards enterprise server (RH) or enterprise
desktop (SuSe): large-scale deployments with big support contracts.

Ubuntu has gone for consumers (home users, home servers), where nobody else
ever managed to build a profitable and sustainable business in the Linux
world.

------
oconnor663
"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.

------
shanemhansen
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
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
I think it might be the seeming similarity to Microsoft's "strategic
priority", which resulted in the W8 Metro UI.

------
shrikant
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
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
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
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)

------
dayjah
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

------
lawl
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.

~~~
Touche
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.

~~~
rlpb
Canonical provided an answer here:
[http://askubuntu.com/a/15295](http://askubuntu.com/a/15295). I think the
answer is interesting, and this could apply equally well to any other vendor.

~~~
Touche
That's a silly answer. The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive
advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that. The
way the companies can compete is by building services on top of the cloud
syncing, and by providing integrations with other services you use. That stuff
makes sense to be proprietary, but the syncing itself doesn't, imo.

~~~
rlpb
> The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The
> existence of dozens of these services should tell you that.

I'm not sure your argument applied at the time. As technology makes progress,
today's competitive advantage is tomorrow's commodity.

In any case, consider the people who pay for Dropbox today. What proportion of
these people don't use integrations or services on top of the basic sync
service?

------
tdobson
Bye Bye UbuntuOne.

You should have been OwnCloud, not a Dropbox wannabe.

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

------
jacquesm
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
> 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

------
Mikeb85
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...

------
ta_ackack
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.

------
happybeing
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!

------
yason
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
Depending on your needs you might check git-annex, unison and others mentioned
in other comments.

------
mariocesar
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
Silver lining in the cloud (sorry could not resist) why don't you optimise for
site deployment and then resell the service?

~~~
mariocesar
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
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.

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

------
frade33
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.

------
derekp7
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.

------
IgorPartola
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.

------
kermit666
How can I self-host Ubuntu One?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516047)

------
paradite
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.

------
psibi
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
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.

------
goshawk
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
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
Thank you! going to see it it has a handly client i can install and it takes
care of syncing...

~~~
tomswartz07
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! :)

------
glutamate
"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
Have you tried Debian + backports?

~~~
glutamate
I haven't, and that seems interesting. But that still means stuck with
sysvinit.

~~~
pjc50
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.

------
juanuys
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."

------
igravious
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
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-
usd...](http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd10bn-as-
stock-market-flotation-is-discussed)

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

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

------
bluedino
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
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
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
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.

------
afhsfsfdsss88
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
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
Dropbox, whose employees see all your files. Which fact people keep forgetting
and rediscovering on an annual basis.

------
72deluxe
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!

------
laxk
What I can use as an alternative for Ubuntu One?

~~~
tomswartz07
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/)

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

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

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

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

~~~
jarek
private git repo on bitbucket is a decent alternative

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

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

------
silveira
It never worked well with me.

------
Dewie
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.

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

------
tedchs
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.

------
pawelkomarnicki
No biggie

------
randunel
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.

------
mindstab
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
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
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.

