How to store home directory contents in Ubuntu One?

Asked by Brian

I would like my home folder to be stored in Ubuntu One. However, if the only place files may reside is ~/Ubuntu\ One/ then I can't put everything else in ~/ into Ubuntu One. It becomes a circular problem!
-Move home folder to inside ~/Ubuntu\ One/ then Ubuntu\ One/ has to be moved inside new home folder, etc etc etc.

All my documents are elsewhere (and backed up elsewhere), but my all my config in my home folder would be nice to back up easily. My documents are too many GBs to rely on Ubuntu One, but being able to back up my config would be very useful. Obviously I could just back up my home folder in addition to my documents, but I would really like to be able to use Ubuntu One for this.

Is it true that the folder has to be at ~/Ubuntu\ One/ or does it have to be at /home/username/Ubuntu\ One/? If I could move my home folder to inside the Ubuntu One folder that would be great.

-Brian

P.S. Microsoft realized using default folder names with spaces in them was a dumb idea, why are you repeating their mistake?

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Joshua Hoover
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Best Joshua Hoover (joshuahoover) said :
#1

Hi Brian,

For Lucid (10.04) Ubuntu One will support what you want. You'll be able to select the folders you want to have synchronized by Ubuntu One rather than having to put everything into the ~/Ubuntu One folder. For some more details, please see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/LucidUbuntuOneSymlinksAndUDFs

As for the default folder name, we're committed to helping open source projects fix bugs that do not function properly as a result of Ubuntu One having a space in the folder name. If you know of a particular application that is not working properly as a result of the space in the Ubuntu One folder name, then please let me know so we can take a look at it.

Thanks!

Joshua

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Brian (x-brian) said :
#2

That's what I was afraid of--I am looking forward to this, but as of now it is basically useless to me. If I have to go through the trouble of changing my folder structure, I might as well set up my own backup system. Storage is cheap.

And regarding the poor choice of folder name--it's not broken apps that you should worry about. It's much easier to use the command line without backslashes all over the place. I REALLY don't want you to start a trend here. Bad, bad Ubuntu One! It only took MS about a decade to realize how dumb that is--but at least they have realized it. Better to learn from their mistake than to repeat it.

And so far we can't even change its name? Worse, worse, Ubuntu One!

Looking forward to more functionality, but PLEASE lose the space.

Thanks,

Brian

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Brian (x-brian) said :
#3

Thanks Joshua Hoover, that solved my question.

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Elliot Murphy (statik) said :
#4

We will not be removing the space from the folder name.

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Brian (x-brian) said :
#5

There's a good chance that this kind of thing will put me into another distro.

First hit was gnome-screensaver. That had to go from my machine, but at least I can still use xscreensaver. Now there's Ubuntu One doing things that were dumb 10 years ago. If it metastasizes into more idiocy I will leave Ubuntu and possibly Gnome as well. If it stays limited to Ubuntu One that will be no problem--I'll just remove it. But eventually it becomes too much trouble.

Too bad because Ubuntu is pretty, but that's only eye candy and if I have to drop it I will.

:^(

-Removing Ubuntu One now.....done.

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brianclements (brianclements) said :
#6

One way you can do this Brian, and this is something I'm debating about doing myself (haven't tested it yet), is to setup your actual Ubuntu One folder on a separate hard drive or partition and then symlink to it in your ~/ folder under it's normal name so that it can sync properly without changing any defaults. From here, you can dive into the ~/Ubuntu\ One/ folder and hardlink back to your ~/ directory. This will then pickup the Ubuntu One folder as just a symlink and won't fall into recursive infinitum. This is actually how I've setup my entire /home directory. I have many hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes of files, and they all have symlinks in my ~/home folder. But if I were to backup or get the size of my home folder, what shows up is just my configuration files and those symlinks and the result is only a couple of GB in size; enough to fit on Ubuntu One Free account. I have separate backup for all those other hard drives and partitions individually using rsync, but I think this will help me get around the problem of wanting a clean and easy way to not only backup my /home to Ubuntu One, but transport those settings across different computers.

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brianclements (brianclements) said :
#7

nevermind, the man pages threw me off, I forgot the kernel doesn't actually allow hardlinks for directories.