I have uploaded some files to my Ubuntu One account and it seems to work great most of the time. I usually upload them directly from Nautilus by right clicking the folder, using the ”Synchronize this folder” option, and then I make sure that the file I want to upload is published.

Then I usually test the whole thing by trying to download it. I right click the file again to get its URL and I paste it into my Web browser. This usually works fine.

But yesterday I uploaded two compressed files – ”.tar.bz2”. When I tried to open them after downloading them with my Web browser (Opera), it failed. I found that the file was bigger than the original file (2358 B instead af 2335 B – 15 B added at the beginning of the file and 8 B added to the end), and someone at the Opera channel (IRC) at OperaNet (Europe) figured out that the reason for this is that the server compress the file again, ”without telling Opera”.

So to be able to extract the file I need to add ”.gz” to the file name and then extract it twice.

If I downloaded it with Firefox however, I didn't need to do that, so maybe Firefox figured this out somehow in a way that Opera does not.

Someone also tried to download the file with wget and some other browser and he also got the same result as I did with Opera, that is the file is compressed a second time by the server.

I guess ”the server” is the Ubuntu One server, right?

So why is this? Could it be done better somehow? Or did I do something wrong when uploading the files?

It also seems like this extra compressing thing does not always happen, because when I tried again a few minutes ago, the file came down with its right size (2335 B), without an extra compression. But the other file (114 MiB) was still compressed twice.