xdg user dirs: not relocating although set?

Question

I relocated my home directories using XDG user dirs as mentioned here:

how to make gnome use my home folder as Desktop folder?

However, this does not work for me so far.

I have set the Downloads directory to /media/Schijf-2/Nico/"Mijn Documenten"/Downloads/ which is a directory with some files. After I saved the file and rebooted, I tried the Downloads directory but it is still the same, empty directory instead of the new location.

this is how the xdg user dirs file looks like:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Bureaublad"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Downloads/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Sjablonen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Openbaar"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Muziek"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Video's"

Is there anything weird which I entered wrong?

edit 1:

I am using XFCE. I see in the file manager that the icon for the directories has changed.

But when I click on 'Downloads' in the sidebar, I see the empty /home/nico/Downloads directory.

Instead of /media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Downloads.

I am using linux mint 13 xfce, which has Thunar as default file manager.

I have now (for the time being) simply added both locations (for Downloads en Documents) to the sidebar.

edit 2: this is the content of /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf:

# This controls the behaviour of xdg-user-dirs-update which is run on user login
# You can also have per-user config in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf, or specify
# the XDG_CONFIG_HOME and/or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to override this
#

enabled=True

# This sets the filename encoding to use. You can specify an explicit
# encoding, or "locale" which means the encoding of the users locale
# will be used
filename_encoding=UTF-8

and these are the contents of etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults:

 Default settings for user directories
#
# The values are relative pathnames from the home directory and
# will be translated on a per-path-element basis into the users locale

    DESKTOP=Desktop
    DOWNLOAD=Downloads
    TEMPLATES=Templates
    PUBLICSHARE=Public
    DOCUMENTS=Documents
    MUSIC=Music
    PICTURES=Pictures
    VIDEOS=Videos
    # Another alternative is:
    #MUSIC=Documents/Music
    #PICTURES=Documents/Pictures
    #VIDEOS=Documents/Videos

the /media/Schijf-2/ is mounted automatically (entry in fstab)

the icons have changed into the icons which are always used for the Downloads and Documents directories.

Edit 3: my ~./config/user-dirs.dirs is completely empty (before rebooting). I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps leafpad was not able to show the contents. When I tried with gedit, I saw the contents of the file again: it is completely the same as I have posted before.

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Bureaublad"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Downloads/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Sjablonen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Openbaar"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Muziek"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Video's"

Because I saw the music dir also had the old dir, I changed it into a different location (almost the same as the documents dir). I changed false to true again. And then executed this command in terminal: xdg-user-dirs-update

I now saw a message: /media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Mijn Muziek was removed, reassigning MUSIC to homedir

This is something I have not seen before. I think everything was changed back to the old location again.

My user-dirs looks like this:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Bureaublad"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Sjablonen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Openbaar"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Mijn muziek"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Video's"

and after xdg-user-dirs-update it looks like this:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Bureaublad"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Sjablonen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Openbaar"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/media/Schijf-2/Nico/Mijn Documenten/Mijn muziek"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Video's"

So nothing has changed. But still, the folder do not link to the directories on /media/Schijf-2/

edit x.x: I noticed that in the user-dirs.conf file this is written:

# This controls the behaviour of xdg-user-dirs-update which is run on user login
# You can also have per-user config in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf, or specify
# the XDG_CONFIG_HOME and/or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to override this

Could this influence the whole situation?

And might it be a problem that I mount this second partition is fstab at startup. But perhaps the xdg-user-dirs-update is ran before the partition is mounted?

edit 5: I tried to relocate the video's directory to video's/video-2/video-3: Still no success. I am really wondering what is wrong here. I am thinking this user profile got corrupted somehow.

Is there some way to reset this user to how it was at the very first login?

I have deleted the user and created a new one. Everything was completely new. I then edited the xdg user-dirs file again and only changed the location for the document.

The documents directory in the sidebar still links to the home/Nico/documents directory, instead of the new location.

I again also tried your suggestion for a directory 2 or 3 levels deeper. (i tried "$HOME/Documenten/Documenten2/Documenten3"). Also, again no success.

edit 6:

I once more tried to change the default directories. Still without success. However, I now have removed Thunar from the system and installed Nemo. Which looks a lot better than Thunar. But for the user-dirs: they are still nog relocating. I give up my attempts to have this done using the standard dirs. I create my own shortcuts and place them under places.

I also found 1 other topic concerning this issue. Also for Linux Mint:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=112422

They also accepted the fact that relocating the user-dirs in the files does not work. In that topic the suggestio is to use bind.