I tried out Ubuntu One when it had just started, and was unimpressed. There were lots of bugs and it didn't seem feature complete. I went back to Dropbox.

Unfortunately I think Canonical has garnered a bit of a reputation for pushing alpha- and beta-quality software as stable to unwitting end users--PulseAudio, Unity (and the latest Compiz), etc.--and Ubuntu One was no exception. I would never, ever trust that kind of release mentality with my mission-critical files. I'm sticking with Dropbox all the way. Though congrats to their reaching 1 million despite that!

You really shouldn't be trusting Dropbox with mission critical files either, but if you want something stable and non-beta, you should be going with LTS releases of Ubuntu. They're very stable and polished, I find.

You mean Ubuntu LTS releases become stable after six months or a year, right? When they're new they're as unstable as any other new Ubuntu release, I find.

I am yet to see a rock-solid OS that's been in the market for less than 6 months.

zOS, perhaps. Solaris, HP-UX and AIX too, but don't expect having the latest version of Ruby on them.

IIRC the PulseAudio debacle was with an LTS release.

I remember that. People complained a lot, but at the time Pulseaudio was pretty stable. It worked well and I personally didn't have any issues. In fact, I'd say I had more issues with ALSA. At the time, Linux audio was a mess... and some may argue it still is.

One should not really trust any cloud based app with any mission critical files that are not backup-ed somewhere else.

I am not sure how the Ubuntu LTS release being stable has anything to do with their Ubuntu One service...

That's probably the best advise. For backup, I trust rsync'ing encFS encrypted files to my server and to a external HDD.

Ubuntu one sync just sits there and eats ram until i kill it. Very annoying. Not impressed.

I keep an eye on resource consumption (via system monitor applet) and I can't see that happening here. Are you sure Ubuntu One is responsible for that?

Same here. I tried to buy am 50GB pack but they had problems accepting PayPal from Germany for some strange reason. They said, it was PayPals fault.

Lucky me it didn't work, because it was impossible to sync my local files, they were "too many". The One client spend days "indexing" my files and never managed to get that done.

Apparently that is or was some bug in One. If they sell 50GB packs they maybe should offer a client that can manage some 100K files.

After some days of trying and hunting bugs I deleted One from my PC and have no intention of trying it again.

I am using it since 10.10. Works well.

Just to ground the 1M figure in reality: how many users does Dropbox have? How many of those are Linux users?

Ubuntu One does have some extra features -- for one, more than twice the capacity on the free account (5GB), it can sync contacts, Tomboy notes, stream music (though as a paying option), and also comes as a default on an operating system (Ubuntu).

Actually the only downside for me recently was not being able to share a DVD iso image recently due to the size limit on the free account, and looks like they fixed that problem now too. Contacts sync was a bit of a pain to get working but it works fine now.

But to answer your question partially (from Wikipedia):

> As of April 2011[update], Dropbox has more than 25 million users. [20]

I would guess most are not Linux users.

Also for more serious backup options people should probably use something like tarsnap.

EDIT:

Just found on their blog from February, they claim 2% Linux users. So around 0.5M I guess ...

( http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339 )

I am curious to how many users of Ubuntu One are on Windows?

Dropbox has always worked well for me and it's cross-platform so I can use it on my laptop also which runs Linux. I like to try Ubuntu One when start to hear more positive things about it and the Windows client comes out of beta.

I'd be more interested in knowing how many Ubuntu installs there have been since Ubuntu One was released to see the uptake rate.

It's installed by default. I am not sure about how many of those get activated and receive continuous usage.

Canonical is starting to rock again. If they can make Unity launcher adjustable or switch from the Unity roadmap and get some decent Gnome 3 in the next release then it will be back on track.

Per the FAQ, files are not encrypted on their servers. Sorry, that's a showstopper.

Even if they were, don't trust such statements and encrypt yourself before sync'ing.

man ecryptfs