Review: Is Ubuntu One Ready For Your Data? (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
SJR
Posted on: Jun 21, 2010 at 02:10pm
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Reviews
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Moving on from my attempt to use the Ubuntu One Music Store, I decided to take a look at Canonical’s other new offering, Ubuntu One’s cloud-based data backup and storage feature. Ubuntu One is available both through the Web and integrated into Ubuntu 10.04 as an extension to the Nautilus file manager. The bottom line: this is a promising service and better executed than the overall Music Store experience, but its best functionality is limited to doing backups of user data in Ubuntu, and it still has some rough edges.
The nerve center of the Ubuntu One account is the dashboard, which offers users handy tools to view and manage their files, music purchases, sync contacts or Tomboy notes and monitor or change their account settings. The design is clean and relatively easy to navigate, although the available on-line help is relatively terse. Complete beginners may want to lean on the services of a more experienced user when learning to navigate and use the system.
Because I was switching my laptop over from Ubuntu 10.04 to Lubuntu for a test drive, I decided to first try using the service for backing up and then transfer my files to the new installation. Normally, I’d copy my files to a thumb drive and be done with it, but that doesn’t leave much to review. (We’ll come back to the thumb drive thing a bit later.) The good news is that the integration of Ubuntu One with Nautilus means that once a user is registered, making a folder on your hard drive sync to your 2GB of on-line storage (more is available with payment) is a simple right-click away.
At this point, I made my first mistake with the service. For folders that are nested inside other folders -- the graphic below shows a folder with screen-shots from a previous review sitting inside my Documents folder -- the easiest solution is to mark the whole parent folder for syncing. And then don’t touch it. This folder-centered approach seems to be the model that Ubuntu One is built around, and works best when the user (not me) is patient and lets the service work in the background. Not bearing this in mind, I selected sub-folders and files to sync sort of at random and wound up with a confusing mishmash of files and folders in my on-line view.
The uploading process itself was simple. Once I selected a folder, right-clicked, and selected the option to sync to Ubuntu One, the file icons inside the selected folder were marked with a circular gray arrow icon, which I took to indicate they were “pending" while they were up-loaded to my account. Once done, the icons changed to a cheery green check mark to show they’d been synced successfully. One the folder was set up the first time, new files and content synced seamlessly in the background. Note that the service doesn’t make it easy to see what the status of your upload or sync is, so be patient.
The other way to upload files to Ubuntu One is manually, using the appropriately-named option (that would be the one that says “Upload file” in case you’re not sure) on the service’s file-management page. This is a good option for one-time file transfers, or for uploading files from operating systems which do not natively support Ubuntu One. (Which at the moment is pretty much everything else, including other flavor of Linux. ) The downside of this method is that it lacks tools for uploading or syncing files in batches, so this quickly becomes tedious.
With my Ubuntu installation overwritten and its Lubuntu cousin churning away on my laptop, it was time to download my files. PCManFM does not have the same integration with Ubuntu One as Nautilus has in Ubuntu 10.04, so I went to the browser. There, one of the other weak points to the service reared its head. Selecting and up- and down-loading files individually is a pain, as noted above. So, although I’d backed up my “Pictures” folder from Ubuntu by syncing, when I wanted to download I found that the only available option for the folder was to share it, not download. To get the pictures in it back on my hard drive in Lubuntu, I needed to download them individually.
Sync’ed folders don’t download...
...butif you’re patient, the individual files do.
Also, I wound up with the files stashed in my “Download" folder, which meant manually moving them. On the bright side, I found that I got stellar download speeds from the service, even in the middle of the day. The browser-based method also let me download files to a Win 7 machine with no issues.
The other features of Ubuntu One are a mixed bag. Sharing files is easy. After selecting the folder I wanted to share, the system sent an email with a link for that folder to the address I’d specified. Once the recipient pastes the link into their browser and navigates to it, they are offered the opportunity to accept the offer to share, and prompted to log in or create an account on Ubuntu One. In my experiments, this worked flawlessly. Shared folders show up as a different color in the files view. This might be helpful in case you don’t want to confuse back-ups of certain late-night downloads with, say, the Eagle Scout photos you shared with your mother.
I was confused by the Ubuntu contacts screen, however. I hadn’t used the service to sync phone contacts, so the announcement on the dashboard that I had a contact was news to me. Also, “0“ proved to not be editable or something I could delete. I wondered if this was an artifact from my playing around and accidentally creating a contact, and what the “1“ in parenthesis is, but am not really sure.
The impression I get is that Canonical is moving this service towards being an all-in-one on-line hub for your personal data, but they’re not quite there yet. So what’s the problem with the service? Basically, Ubuntu One offers polished backup functionality if you using it through the file manager in Ubuntu, but many of the other features that might take it beyond that are still rough.
The lack of cross-platform integration, including between different flavors of Linux, is a tough one to get past. In my move to Lubuntu, for instance, I would have saved a significant amount of time simply backing up my files to that USB drive and going from there. There are also some surprisingly rough edges to the service. For instance, at one point I made a mistake while uploading a file and got this cryptic message:
That was it. Just a page with that and nothing else. A different error message from the files page shoved me back to an error page that was more informative, but branded for the Ubuntu One Music Store which I wasn’t using.
Besides better handling of batches of files, a simple improvement would be to include a better way to gauge the progress of up- and downloads. There is a certain elegance to having the sync process chug along in the background, but it was often difficult for me to tell if any data was actually moving. Google Docs, for instance, offers a simpler and more self-evident way to tell how your files are doing.
The other stumbling block to my adopting this is the pricing structure, which zooms from 2GB for free to 50GB for US $120 per year with no intermediate settings. For a more polished service, I’d consider this, but at this point that’s asking too much. As it is now, Ubuntu One is broadly competent, but lacks that special “something” that would make it a compelling choice as a pay service.
To be fair, it clearly says at the top of the Ubuntu One web page that it’s in beta and I was nowhere near as irritated with the quirks in the free version of Ubuntu One as I was with the Music Store. This is a solid start and potentially a really big thing for Ubuntu users. The idea of having an all-in-one service for handling and managing different types of data from your Linux desktop is a great one, and a more polished and versatile implementation of the functions here could be a compelling addition to the open-source experience.
Author: sjr@gmx.us
(CC) BY-NC-SA-United States License
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