The cloud service that Ubuntu offers pre-installed in their latest 10.04 Lucid works as it should. It works.

But – what the heck – they do NOT encrypt the data stored in the cloud!? In reality, that means that who ever has access to the server may read my plain non-encrypted files. Ugh – what a show stopper!

Dropbox did offer encryption on their service. Well, I don’t think you could chose not to use it, but even so, several of us did not feel 100% safe. I have written about this earlier:

https://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/encfs-mount-over-nonempty-mount-point/
https://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-encrypted/
https://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/dropbox-without-nautilusgnome/

In reality that was double security – and that felt good! Making an encrypted folder to sync to the cloud have even more merit together with Ubuntu One! Yes, you will loose the option of publishing your files for easy sharing and access to your friends… or?

With Lucid, Ubuntu One allows you to specify which folders to sync to your cloud account. So it should be fairly straight forward to keep one folder encrypted with highly personal data and one folder for sharing data – why not just use the default Public folder?! I am rather amazed that Ubuntu One does not support encryption by default.

At least I feel a lot more calm knowing my files are encrypted.