ubuntuone-users team mailing list archive

[Elliot Murphy <elliot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Glenton Jelbert
<glenton.jelbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Thanks for all the great work.  Ubuntu 10.4 is the best yet, and they've
> been pretty fantastic recently!

Thanks! That is so nice to hear. Everyone working on Ubuntu One cares
a lot about Ubuntu and reads all the feedback and comments we can find
about our work, even though we don't have time to respond to it all.

> I was wondering about the possibility of a Foldershare/Windows Live type
> feature, where folders are synced between several computers *without* being
> synced to a server.  With Foldershare, it only did the sync when both
> computers were on-line, but it was completely behind the scenes (not unlike
> the current Ubuntu One sync, except with a peer computer instead of a
> server).
>
> Are there any plans afoot to do something like this?  I'd love to try to get
> involved.

I'd love to have this kind of functionality in Ubuntu One, but right
now I have more design questions than answers, definitely not anywhere
near some concrete plans.

In my opinion, there are two reasons for building out this kind of
local functionality. One is user autonomy, and one is performance
optimization. I want to get to the point where Ubuntu One users have
the absolute best of both worlds with autonomy and the convenience of
cloud services. Kind of a personal cloud, where you actually have
copies of all your data so that if the cloud servers go away or you
don't like them anymore, you are not crippled and your systems still
work. We have this right now with the CouchDB part of Ubuntu One
(contacts, bookmarks, tomboy notes), we ship tools to let you set up
your own local CouchDB server to sync with instead of the Ubuntu One
server. With files the only thing you have currently is a copy of all
your files - if we turn off the Ubuntu One servers sync stops working.
Ideally, we could create a local tiered server somehow so that you
still get the convenience of syncing and sharing with other people,
but also have the option of setting up a local server component (or
even better, make it work P2P).

The second reason for this kind of work is performance, and I think
we'll be working on some of the building blocks for this in the next 6
months. Some possibilities include slicing up files into smaller
chunks so that uploads are resumable, and then perhaps checking for
nearby peer systems that already have that content chunk before
requesting a download from the server.

Right now the ubuntuone-storage-protocol is designed to work in more
of a star configuration, where each client talks directly to the
server. One of the other problems we have in the current design is
that control messages are interlaced with content upload/download. I'm
very interested in figuring out a next generation design that adds
some of these capabilities, but we'll probably go a bit slowly on this
because we need to be very careful in thinking about backward
compatibility and making sure that we keep the system working smoothly
for older clients.
-- 
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/