Ubuntu – How to sync folders on different partitions (symlink?)

Please read “How can I tell whether Ubuntu One file sync is working, and what progress it is making?”.

Folders are the first thing created, and it's entirely possible the syncdaemon is chugging along doing its thing. You haven't mentioned what version of Ubuntu you're on, so I don't know what performance to expect from your client (it's improved drastically with each release).

How many files and folders are you trying to upload, and what's the total size? If you have a lot (tens of thousands) of small files, you might be experiencing the worst performance problem we have right now (we are fixing it for 11.04). If you have very large files that don't finish uploading between network glitches or hiccups (such as suspending your machine), it might be stuck reuploading the same file over and over; this is another issue we're fixing for 11.04.

If it turns out that progress isn't happening (and the above article doesn't get you to nudge it in the right direction), try first quitting, restarting and connecting the syncdaemon. The way to do that will work across all versions of Ubuntu right now is by entering the following in a terminal:

u1sdtool --quit
u1sdtool --start
while ! u1sdtool -c >&/dev/null; do sleep 30; done

this should be enough to “unstick” the syncdaemon from whatever got it into trouble, and set it on its way. Use what you learned in the other article to track progress, and restart it if it seems stuck for too long.

I figure it is bad form to leave my question without an answer. I eventually resolved all issues by following bessman's solution by the letter. He made it much clearer than the official docs how I was supposed to modify fstab - and now I also know how to create backups before I do so and got rid of the "documents inside a documents folder" issue - so triple props to his step-by-step solution. I wish I could upvote him twice since nothing else seemed to work.