Canonical will decommission its long-running text-hosting service Ubuntu Pastebin on May 31.
The company is pulling the plug as part of a broader “infrastructure modernization and migration project”, according to Canonical Community Engineer Aaron Prisk.
Ubuntu Pastebin works similarly to GitHub’s Gist, albeit without the revision history. It’s been available as a tool the community can use since late 20071.
The service was partly launched to help the distro’s official IRC support channels. They were often flooded with reams of terminal output from users requesting help. Paste links were also used by the wider community, often to provide quick access to commonly-asked information.
It originally lived at paste.ubuntu.com domain, with the pastebin.ubuntu.com domain being added later. Both domains and links continue to work interchangeably. The service also later expanded paste coverage to include syntax highlighting.
However, it was never aimed at archival needs. The site’s own blurb still notes that it is “intended for use as a short-term exchange”, with users warned that data is “not guaranteed to be permanent, and may be removed at any time.”
That time is now nigh.
Will the loss be felt? Outside of core developer circles Ubuntu Pastebin has been largely forgotten. The immediate headache will be for those who knowingly link to pastes on Reddit threads, wiki answers, AskUbuntu, etc. Those links will shortly break.
If you think you might have scripts, notes or configuration files on the service, now is the time to log in to your Ubuntu One account2 to check and back up what you need before they vanish for good.
Alternatives to Ubuntu Pastebin include GitHub Gist, PrivateBin and Debian Paste. If you have a favourite you use, feel free to give it a shout out in the comments.
- The Ubuntu paste service predates my discovery of Ubuntu (and thus this blog). I can’t find a formal announcement on its availability, but a handful of links (seemingly) from 2008 have links to old pastes. ↩︎
- Using Ubuntu Pastebin requires an Ubuntu One account, but in the early days it could be used anonymously. ↩︎