How is UbuntuOne Distinct from Dropbox or Amazon Cloud?

**GregA** · April 19th, 2013

Am thinking of storing about 2/3 gig on a free cloud service, . . . how does UbuntuOne compare with a few of the others . . . or are they all pretty similar?

Thanks much!

**fantab** · April 19th, 2013

They do the same job and are 'pretty similar'. However, AFAIK Ubuntu One gives a freee space of 5gb as compared to Dropbox, which gives only 2GB... also, I don't know how well Ubuntu One works on Windows.

More comparisions: HERE and HERE

**CaptainMark** · April 19th, 2013

There's not a huge difference, I used to be able to say I trusted Canonical not to abuse my data but alas I can no longer say that. Ubuntu one merges really well with Ubuntu, or Ubuntu based distros but Dropbox has clients available for lots more Linux distros. If you plan on sticking with Ubuntu forever and ever, use Ubuntu One, if there's even a small part of you that will ever want to use something different then use Dropbox.

Ubuntu One does have the advantage that the free sign-up gets you 5GB as opposed to Dropbox's 2GB but you can either purchase more storage or "refer" your friends for more free storage

EDIT: ^^^ fantab has lightening quick fingers, beat me to it,

It is also worth mentioning that I find the Dropbox Andriod app far superior to the Ubuntu One Android app, they try to do the same thing but I find the Ubuntu One app is just sub-standard

**mastablasta** · April 19th, 2013

i use multiple clouds. why limits yourself only to one?
SpiderOak - encrypted cloud - for soem perosnal files
UbuntuOne when i have something to share arround
Google Drive (comes free with google acocunt)

Am thinking about mega, dropbox and skydrive when i run out of space

**kumoshk** · April 19th, 2013

I'm not too familiar with UbuntuOne and Dropbox, but I can tell you about Amazon's cloud service, and you can decide from what you know/learn about the others if that helps.

Amazon has a lot of services with its cloud. It's not just storage for random stuff. For instance, all the e-books, music, Android apps and such that you purchase from Amazon are stored on your Cloud (and these don't take away from your 5GB memory limit for random files).

There's the Amazon Cloud Player, which allows you to stream and/or download music you've purchased on Amazon. I don't know if it lets you play other music you upload. This is a nice feature that the Kindle Fire supports. The streaming is nice because you don't have to worry about how much memory you're taking up on your device.

There's the Kindle Cloud Reader (see read.amazon.com), and Kindle Apps for tablets, mobile devices and such. These allows you to read e-books you've purchased on Amazon. The Kindle Cloud Reader is a web app for your desktop or laptop that will let you 'stream' the books (so they're not stored on your computer), or you can download them. It's pretty nice, and it's what you'll likely be using if you want to read Amazon e-books on Ubuntu (unless you emulate Android or something, but it's nice enough that there's no real need). The only Kindle e-reading apps I've used are the one that comes with the Kindle Fire 1 and the Kindle Fire 2, although they have them available for just about any device. You have access to the cloud on the official Kindle Fire reading apps, too, of course, but you don't get the option to 'stream' the books, so-to-speak. You can, however, download and delete them at your leisure. It's pretty nice. You can get hundreds of free books on your cloud every day, too. Downloading them can be habit forming, by the way. Here's the URL (see top 100 Free, and select genres on the left for more specific lists of top 100 free books):
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-K..._2_155009011_1

Picture books work on the Kindle Cloud Reader, as well as the Kindle Fire apps. Oh, I've used a regular Kindle. I think those have access to the book portion of the cloud (and maybe to your personal docs, but I don't remember). The regular Kindle does not support picture books, and it's a lot slower—so, huge books may be a lot slower than they are on the Kindle Fire. The Paperwhite might be a lot faster than what I tried, however, and I'm guessing future devices will be faster than that and eventually support color picture books and more (the Jetbook is the only color E-ink device I know about, so far).

Amazon Instant Video videos are also stored on your cloud. You can watch these on your computer, Kindle Fire, Roku and lots of random stuff, such as the Wii, various TVs and whatever else. However, they don't have an Android app to watch them on other Android devices besides the Kindle Fire. I'm guessing they'll produce one some day, but I wouldn't count terribly on it. The videos stream, but on some devices you can download them.

Audible books are stored on a cloud, but I don't know if it's the same cloud. Maybe.

It's a pretty good cloud, considering the services it offers, and all the free books you can get and never have to worry about losing. I'm sure the other clouds have a lot of advantages in some regards, but I really haven't researched it, yet.

**Impavidus** · April 19th, 2013

I encrypt all files I send to any cloud, so the question of trust comes down to nothing more than the question whether they will ever go off-line. Which is, of course, a very real possibility.