How do I sync an external drive using Ubuntu One?

Question

At present on my laptop I have a dual boot XP and Ubuntu and from Ubuntu I would like to Sync folders on my XP partition use Ubuntu One but the option is not available when right click on any file or folder in the XP partition. Is it possible to do this and how.

Answer 1

Currently the Ubuntu One client only supports synchronising folders found under your home directory. So you will need to arrange for the files you want to sync to appear somewhere under $HOME.

There are two options here:

Mount the file system under /home

Just create a directory to use as the mount point and update the /etc/fstab file to use that mount point instead.

Create a bind mount

If you don't want to change the mount point for the file system, you can create a bind mount to make some of the content appear in both locations:

mount --bind /source/directory /home/user/target

You should be able to make a bind mount like this permanent by adding an entry to /etc/fstab like:

/source/directory /home/user/target none bind 0 0

Once the files appear under your home directory, you should be able to synchronise them with Ubuntu One.

Since the folder name most likely contains a white space (Ubuntu One), the line in /etc/fstab should go like this: /source/directory /home/user/Ubuntu\040One/target none bind 0 0

because fstab takes "\040" as white space.

Answer 2

Not a direct answer to you questions but did you see there is an Ubuntu One program for Windows (beta):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/Windows

I dont now how good it works, but maybe you give it a try. When i understand the wiki correctly at present you can only share something inside the U1-folder with Windows. So it is no help for getting something from "My Documents" into Ubuntu One.

But i would guess the windows client should getting better in the next months.

Answer 3

It is very difficult to synchronize external data sources. It is possible to fool Ubuntu One into syncing it, but if you remove that external disk, then Ubuntu One will delete everything from that device from all other computers and from the web. This is what's supposed to happen; if you remove files, then the removal should be synced.

In other words, even if it's possible to fool Ubuntu One into doing it, I would strongly advice against it. The likelyhood that you'll get burned is very high.