U1DB: Canonical's Platform-Agnostic Data Synchronisation Solution
23.05.12
A large number of people today use multiple devices in their everyday work. Often times, you need access to the same kind of data on multiple devices.
Numerous synchronization solutions have sprung up recently, DropBox, SugarSync, SpiderOak etc. Some of them offer synchronization across computers and devices. If you use some kind of synchronization solution, which folder(s) do you synchronize? What do you place in this folder? Chances are you will not be able to synchronize all you data because there is no single location that stores all your data really.
Most software we use have their own locations for storing their data, so your data is actually all over the place. For example, you'd probably want your contacts accessible from both you mobile, and desktop. However something like DropBox is of limited use in that scenario.
The same is true of a lot of data. You probably need to use the same bookmarks, passwords, etc on all your computes, so browsers offer synchronization solutions for that. Firefox, Chrome and Opera each have an independent solution for this data. Why should each software have to reinvent the wheel? Why create an entire sync platform for each new software?
Source: Digit