All remaining user data to go to the great file shredder in the sky

If you’re yet to retrieve files stored on Ubuntu One, Canonical’s zombified cloud storage service, you are pretty much out of time.

Ubuntu One, whose cessation was announced by Canonical earlier in the year, entered the final stages of shutdown back in June. Today, that shutdown becomes more final. At the end of today, July 31, all data left unclaimed will be deleted from the Ubuntu One server forever.

Dramatic pause.

Shocked? You shouldn’t be. Today’s deadline has been known since the axe fell on the beleaguered service in April. Canonical has also been proactive in alerting users to the cutoff, sending out numerous e-mail reminders and providing download tools to help make data export easy.

Also See: This was our initial impressions of the service shortly after launch in 2009

The Brand Plays On

Launched back in 2009 (initially as invitation only, no less), today marks a muted end to what started out as a promising service. It fought hard to stay buoyant amidst a sea of rivals, providing native desktop sync software for Mac OS X and Windows and mobile apps for Android and iOS.

An (admittedly flawed) music-streaming service followed, as did wooing of developers with easy-to-use APIs, database sync and the odd frivolous extra.

Sadly, all to no avail. In the face of better, faster and cheaper competition the cloud storage service couldn’t find its own place in the sky.

The Ubuntu One brand itself is far from dead. As announced in June of last year, Canonical brought the ‘Single Sign-on Service’ (required to purchase software on Ubuntu Software Centre and install apps on Ubuntu for devices) under the U1 banner to create a unified service.

Getting Files

If you manage to read this article sooner rather than later you still may be able to grab your files. Individual file downloads from the ‘read-only’ web dashboard are no longer working, but both the download script released last month and the mover.io migration service are, as of early afternoon BST, still functioning.

Expect both of these to fall offline by the end of the day.

When did you first starting using the service? What could it have done better? Share your memories, musings and critical mauling in the space below.