It's not going to change, at least in the foreseeable future (and on this I can foresee a couple of years into the future). Allowing users to select arbitrary folders outside of their home for syncing with Ubuntu One, which could potentially sync between multiple different computers, opens a large number of usability problems to cover a use case that, quite frankly, isn't all that common.
One of the problems that I remember off the top of my head is that if you try to sync a mount point of a removable device (and quite a few people try to do this), when you remove the device syncdaemon will delete everything; to make it work properly syncdaemon would have to know about devices, detect their removal, things like that. Quite a large effort, and a lot of potential for usability nightmares.
Another problem is if you try to sync a folder with special permissions, ownership or file types in it: think of /etc/
, /tmp/
or /dev/
as some of the worst cases. Or any folder you don't own, really. We could simply disallow syncing folders you don't own, but we know for a fact some people are running syncdaemon as root (despite our warnings).
A workaround for you would be to mount (via /etc/fstab
, so you're reasonably sure the partition is mounted every time -- otherwise you risk losing your synced data) the /data
folder into your home. You could simply move /data
to ~/data
or, if you have things that have the /data
path hardcoded (quite likely), or if you're already used to /data
yourself (also quite likely), symlink or bind mount /data
to the mount point in your home. If you don't want to see it in your home at all, just make it ~/.data
.
We are only syncing pictures at the moment because the API the Android client uses has not been yet optimised for large files (mostly it doesn't support resuming failed uploads).
Because videos are on average much larger than pictures, we've started off with pictures.
Making our APIs support uploading large files is something we have on our plates to fix, so you should eventually see support for video added.
Best Answer
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:
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.