Ubuntu One: Not the Holy Cloud Grail but useful enough and with a lot of potential

Canonical has been touting its Ubuntu One cloud-storage solution, which allows you to mirror up to 2 GB of files for free and up to 50 GB for $10/month.

The service also allows you to sync Tomboy Notes and Evolution contacts across multiple Ubuntu installations.

I gave Ubuntu One a try on my recently upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 system, and it appears that Ubuntu One just doesn't do very much that I need.

And whether it's the service's simplicity or lack of decent documentation, it took me awhile to figure out just how you get stuff synced with Ubuntu One.

It turns out you can't pick and choose directories on your Ubuntu box to backup/mirror across your various Ubuntu desktops (and right now I have only one system — this one — capable of using Ubuntu One).

Instead, to have files saved/mirrored, you need to drop them in the Ubuntu One folder/directory that is created in your Home directory. You drop stuff into that folder and the app mirrors it, where you can see the results at https://one.ubuntu.com

What I'd like to use Ubuntu One (or any other cloud-storage system) for is to back up the directories I select. I don't want to have to dump everything into a single folder. That would seriously mess with my file-management mojo.

And I don't use Tomboy or Evolution, so syncing those notes and contacts holds little appeal for me ...

And ... (you knew there was another and) I'd like to access these documents on other desktops that aren't running Ubuntu, or even running Linux.

The good news (and the biggest reason why I probably WILL use Ubuntu One at least a little bit) is that any client computer with a Web browser can access the shared Ubuntu One files at https://one.ubuntu.com ... this thing could be useful after all. I just uploaded a file into Ubuntu One from my Windows machine and did see that file in the Web interface on my Ubuntu computer. Once I remembered to "turn on" Ubuntu One by clicking on the little cloud icon in the upper GNOME panel, I received a notification that files were syncing. And sure enough, a few seconds later I saw the file in question in my Ubuntu One directory.

So for my purposes anyway, Ubuntu One is a somewhat useful FTP/sandbox area in which to share files across the many computers I use in a given week.

I suppose something like JungleDisk at this point is much better suited to the specific task of backing up to the cloud, but a free 2 GB is something that can come in handy.

Given the need to place items in the Ubuntu One directory in order to get them into the cloud, I really can't use the service as a true backup system. And if I exceeded 2 GB and had to pay the $10/month but didn't use the full 50 GB, I'd be paying more for Ubuntu One than I would for Amazon S3 storage in JungleDisk (although that doesn't factor in download/upload charges, just the monthly per-GB storage costs of about 15 cents/GB plus JungleDisk's $2/month fee).

I'd rather have a Ubuntu One that could pick/choose among my system's many directories what gets backed up/mirrored, just like I do with the rsync scripts I use to back up my system to USB drives.

I have a pretty good feeling that Ubuntu One is under heavy development (the Web site labels it as "beta"), and perhaps a more sophisticated way of both choosing what will be mirrored and even perhaps making the service function more as a backup application (i.e. allowing a user to archive files that aren't necessarily on the hard drive at all and keeping them in case of hardware/software disaster on the local machine) ... and syncing Firefox bookmarks, Thunderbird contacts and more just might be in the offing.

Again, there are a few services that compete quite well with Ubuntu One — including the Linux-compatible, very-much-cross-platform single-folder-syncs-all (and identically priced up to 50 GB) Dropbox, which looks a lot more built out than Ubuntu One at this point.

Still, a free 2 GB is a nice enticement for any given cloud-backup service. And watching what Ubuntu One eventually becomes looks to be a popular sport among FOSS proponents. I'll be one of them.

But right here, right now, the cross-platform nature of Dropbox makes it the better service for anybody who wants easier access to files from non-Ubuntu (and non-Linux) machines.

Later: I just took a look at the Dropbox blog, and that very blog subtly tells Ubuntu users that Dropbox is ready for them and has its own Karmic-specific repository that they can add to their /etc/apt/sources.list for automatic installation and updates of the Dropbox client software.

This still isn't quite what I want. Complicating matters is the fact that a) I don't exactly know what I want, and b) I don't know what's possible on the currently offered cloud-backup services.

I do know that for the most part I want a certain subset of my overall files synced across all of my desktops, but I also want another subset of files archived and accessible from all desktops yet not synced to them. And then there's the problem of stored e-mail. I have about 2 GB of mail in Thunderbird right now, all POPped down to my main PC. I'm not anxious to go back to IMAP, but the overly large files that Thunderbird's mbox format creates are laborious to back up and potentially hard to sync (OK ... I really don't know how easy or hard it would be).

At one level, I think all of this would be much easier if I finally pulled the trigger and piped my mail through Gmail, using POP through Thunderbird as a secondary way of dealing with that mail. That's another overly boring geeky tale for another overly boring geeky blog post.