Comments on: Notification about Notes

By: Andreas

Andreas — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 05:22:09 +0000

The recommended recovery method has some flaws. I lost 359 notes on my machine, but recovering from backup restored only 339. Which 20 notes I have lost its unknown to me. Very disappointing.

Luckily I can recover all 359 notes from another machine.

Moreover, on my five synced machines the backup folder is never an exact copy of the tomboy folder, on most machines the backup folder contains many more notes than the tomboy folder, so a straight copy restore as suggested would require many hours of work cleaning out old duplicates etc. I would recommend restoring from the tomboy folder on another machine (that has recently been synced) instead, if you have that option.

Anyway, this was the last drop, and I have now finally (somewhat regretfully) moved on to evernote, which appears to be one of the few solid multi-platform options. I’ll miss tomboy, but not the last few years of buggyness and development stagnation.

By: Joshua Hoover

Joshua Hoover — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:30:24 +0000

@Rui Sorry, for some reason your comment got flagged in WordPress as spam. File sync and data sync (like notes, contacts, etc.) are two different things. Notes, part of data sync, is hosted on a database technology that collapses under any amount of load for us. After trying to make this work in many, many different ways, we came to the conclusion that the database technology was not a good fit for what we were trying to do. We’ve deployed a new database and are calling the service on top of it U1DB, which provides data sync services. We’ve been carefully load testing U1DB and testing it out in isolated small services which are server side only and have stable APIs. Unfortunately, Notes does not meet this criteria. We’re still interested in making Notes work with U1DB and are reaching out to developers interested in trying it out.

By: Joshua Hoover

Joshua Hoover — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:03:33 +0000

@Rob Just to be clear, we’re not dropping support of notes sync because of Tomboy. The reasons are all Ubuntu One specific.

By: Rob Cogwheel

Rob Cogwheel — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:42:36 +0000

Kinda disappointed. Ah well, to hell with tomboy anyway, it’s mono and buggy&slow. Good luck to you guys, hope this is for the best.

By: Joshua Hoover

Joshua Hoover — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:28:18 +0000

@Philipp This does not affect your U1 contacts though yesterday’s deployment did make changes to contacts. Please contact support directly for help: https://one.ubuntu.com/help/contact

By: Joshua Hoover

Joshua Hoover — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:27:10 +0000

@Jay It’s not so much of getting out of the personal cloud as it is with doing the personal cloud in a scalable manner. Notes sync was a very early service we launched to prove out our initial version of our data sync service which was based on database technology we’ve learned is not appropriate for our use cases. Now that we have U1DB, our focus is on making that rock solid for our existing services where we make use of it (e.g. music streaming) and also enabling other developers to build on top of it. But, the difference between now and then, is now we’re taking a more methodical approach to building out U1DB on the services based on it. We’ve learned some hard yet important lessons.

By: Philipp

Philipp — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:40:08 +0000

does this change in any way also affect my u1 contacts? i just asking since they’re all gone since yesterday. is there any chance of getting them back from some backup?

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:22:20 +0000

Disappointed as well. I too joined U1 because of Tomboy sync. To me it signaled that U1 was moving in a direction towards a true “personal cloud” that might eventually hold notes, contacts, calendars, etc. Now it seems like U1 is “just another” Dropbox, sadly. I understand the high costs associated with the notes sync. But I think moving in the personal cloud direction could have helped you innovate more.

Unrelated: I stopped using Tomboy because it’s buggy as all hell and I filed a bug report that made the application unusable and got now response after months of pestering. Now using GNotes and am very happy, with no bugs. Plus it’s mono free (though that is not *at all* why I went with it).

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:10:19 +0000

Shame, the note feature was something I really liked and hoped the new infrastructure would improve. Really confused as to where Ubuntu One is going as they keep coming up with great ideas, but then struggle with execution.

By: Joshua Hoover

Joshua Hoover — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:32:50 +0000

@Adrian Thanks for the support and feedback. It sounds like you are talking about file sync. There is a file sync indicator going into the next release: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/02/new-sync-menu-added-to-ubuntu-13-04-by-default If you have other suggestions or need help with Ubuntu One, please contact our support team directly at https://one.ubuntu.com/help/contact