Ubuntu One Clients for KDE and Fedora

Is anyone here using Ubuntu One. I'm looking for a decent backup utility and if it works well I might try it.

If you can set up your own backup in the cloud, why trust someone else?

@chalbersma: Do you have a friend with a server? Be neighborly. Tar.gz and GPG-encypt your backup and upload to his server. Let him do the same on your home server. Just make sure you store a paper or digital copy of your GPG key somewhere so when your house burns down you can still decrypt the backup.

If bandwidth is an issue you can use encfs instead. Backup to an encfs-encrypted directory, then rsync it to your friend. Because encfs works on a file-by-file basis you only need to rsync over the difference instead of the whole backup like you would with a big GPG ncrypted file.

I've been experimenting with it.

In fact I've just posted an article on how I transparently access encrypted files that I've stored on the Ubuntu One Service.

whoa guys i just wanted to know if it was a decent service for the price.

@trac Thanks for the heads up.

yes I use it - works pretty good. I use the free 2 gig service though. integrates nicely on the desktop

I've experimented with Ubuntu One but am not using it very much for these reasons:

-- Items that you wish to sync must be in the Ubuntu One directory. I'd rather have a system that chooses which directories on my system to back up rather than have a single directory in which I have to keep everything. Perhaps in time Ubuntu One will add this functionality.

-- Automatic syncing can bite you in the behind if you rely on it for backup. What if you hose a directory or file and Ubuntu One syncs the hosed version to the cloud? If you were making traditional backups, you could get the "unhosed" version back. But with automatic syncing, mistakes quickly become unfixable if they're automatically synced to the cloud.

-- Non-Ubuntu systems can only access Ubuntu One data through the Web interface. Even other Linux systems currently can't use Ubuntu One's client. If you want a service like Ubuntu One, Dropbox is a better choice because it works on Windows, Mac and many if not most Linux systems.

-- I do have a use for this kind of synchronization (in a single folder), but I can pretty much take care of it using an ftp server. However, I like the fact that Ubuntu One uses encryption (I know you can implement that with FTP, but I'm too lazy). I definitely will be using it as a Web-accessible file transfer utility. But it doesn't fit my needs as a backup utility/service (I'm currently rsyncing to USB drives and considering JungleDisk as a cloud-based backup service).

@Steven:

Your link didn't come through properly.

I didn't mean to have a link (I edited around it) ... LXer sees the letters "ftp" followed by a period and turns it into a hyperlink.

@Steven: As a workaround for the single folder issue, you can use symlinks or mount binds for it.

For offsite backups of non-super-sekkrit stuff I've been testing Spideroak.com. You get 2 gigs/mo. free, then small prices for more. I'm no encryption guru but the way they implement it they claim "zero knowledge" of your stuff, they don't even see directories or files. If you lose your password oops, no way to get to your backups anymore. They throw in some nice features like account sharing and file sharing. It's a nice service and I will probably start putting customers on it.

Thanks all.

tuxchick has succumbed to the cloud monster. If she can be coopted like this then none of us are safe!

[Ducks]

Join usssss......

Braaaaains....

Resistance is futile.

Your @ss will be laminated.

All your data are belong to us.

tuxchick, I've looked into spideroak. Definitely worth a test.

Sander, once you start getting into the geekiness of symlinks and such to make Ubuntu One work, I lose interest. I spent enough time getting my rsync scripts to work. I want my next couple of backup schemes to be less work on my part.