Dire news indeed.

As of July 31, 2014, any and all files saved to the cloud service will be deleted, with core features being shut off from June 1. [1]

Damn it! This was one of the greatest features in Ubuntu. I used it to host ixbar3000’s image packages and for many to whom I talked Ubuntu about, it was always a topic they were interested in.

Was is any good?

It was simply the best file hosting service. With 5 GB free for all (+0.5G for each referral up to 25GB), no file expiration, direct links to files, no captcha, syncing and publishing. Even to this day there is nothing quite like this. Sure there were some bugs, but they were minor in comparison to the great service offered. But apparently it was too expensive. (And the music store was kind of useless).

The shutdown will not affect the Ubuntu One single sign on service, the Ubuntu One payment service, or the backend U1DB database service. [2]

… Yeah, great. Right now there are no more good reasons for me to stick with Ubuntu. I dislike Unity, lack of customization and now this. Perhaps I should go back to Arch ;).

What now?

Syncing and publishing files I can live with, but I do host 2.5 GB of images for my ixbar3000 project. I have no other place where to put them. Sure I have the files on my HDD, but how on earth can I distribute the files now? Are there some unknown alternative? a torrent perhaps? or perhaps there’s a website somewhere that could host them.

All I know is that I’m not happy about this. I was just about to announce Amiga, NDS and PSP image sub-projects too.