Where should I mount my internal drive partitions?
As far as I searched on the internet, I came to know that
/Media = mount point for removable media that system do it itself ( usb drive , CD )
/Mnt = temporarily mounting anything manually
I can most probably mount anything wherever I want, but if that’s the case what’s the point of /mnt? Just to be organised I suppose.
TLDR
If /mnt is for temporary and /media is for removable where should permanent non-removable devices/partitions be mounted. i.e. an internal HDD which is formatted as NTFS but needs to be automounted at startup?
Asking with the sole reason to know that, what’s the practice of user who know Linux well, unlike me.
I know this is a silly question but I asked anyway.
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Backups copy from backups to backups from backups to backups. Disk full.
Can you please elaborate?
Infinite recursion. If you backup data in your home dir, then you probably don’t want your backups mounted inside your home Dir.
That actually happens? I thought that TimeShift or whatever utility will sense that and just don’t the recursion thing.
It depends on your backup tool
I’ve had some problems with mounting disks in my user home folder. I can’t recall the details, but it did cause me a headache at some point.
Thanks for the heads up.
I have no idea man. Seems fine though.
Mount them where you need. Not
/mntand not/media. Maybe/varor its subdirectory, or/srv, or/optdepending on what kind of data you want to store on that partition.Not
/mntand not/mediaWhy though?
what kind of data
Just media files, downloads, images , music kinda stuff.
Why though?
The filesystem is organized to store data by its type, not by the physical storage. In DOS/Windows you stick to separate “disks”, but not in Unix-like OSes. This approach is inconvenient in case of removable media, that’s why
/mediaexists. And/mntis not suited for any particular purpose, just for the case when you need to manually mount some filesystem to perform occasional actions, that normally never happens.Just media files, downloads, images , music kinda stuff.
That’s what usually goes to
/home/<username>. Maybe mount that device directly to/home? Or, if you want to extend your existent/homepartition, use LVM or btrfs to join partitions from various drives. Or mount the partition to some subdirectory of/home/<username>, or even split it and mount its parts to/home/<username>/Downloads,/home/<username>/Moviesetc. So you keep the logic of filesystem layout and don’t need to remember where you saved some file (in/home/<username>/Downloadsor in/whatever-mountpoint-you-use/downloads).
Unless dictated by the particular data in the disks, /mnt is generally used for system managed volumes and /media is used for user managed volumes.
If you do something else, stick with it so you don’t get confused.
IMO you should use LVM2 or one of the high level filesystems that have similar features, and then dynamically create partitions and mount them as needed. E.g. Suddenly need 50G for a new VM image? Make a partition and mount it where you need the space.
If I’m not wrong LVM is a method which joins all your disk into single storage pool.
Let’s say I stored data all across my LVM, now I remove one of the disks. What happen now?
You are correct, LVM combines 1 or more disks into 1 or more storage pools that can then be allocated out to logical volumes as needed.
If you just up and pull a disk from a pool (volume group), you’re gonna have a bad time. You can, however, migrate the “extents” allocated to that physical disk to another in order to replace the disk, and your logical volumes can be set up with RAID-like redundancy. There’s a lot of options on how to manage it.
Thank you for explaining.
No problem! To expand further, I am 99% certain it would be perfectly viable to have a single disk volume group and just take advantage of LVM’s ability to create, resize and delete virtual partitions on the fly. I think you could also put all your disks into a single volume group, then ask it to not spread your logical volumes across multiple disks, if you wanted to. Could get a bit fiddly though.
As far as I’m concerned, everything goes under /mnt , and has for the past 18+ years.
Mount your internal disks to
/D:,/E:,/F:, etc.🥇
Permanent drives should be put wherever you want them to, for example I have mine mounted in
/ld1for Large Disk 1./mediais supposed to be used by systems to mount things you plug, but some systems move that to/var/run/mediaor other places./mntis there so you don’t have to create a folder in case you want to mount something really quick.Thanks man.
/[UUID or PART-UUID].[partition number/letter]
I’m an OpenBSD user, but it shouldn’t be hard to translate this to Linux:
If the partition I want to mount is
/dev/sd0i, and sd0’s UID/DUID is3c6905d2260afe09, I mount/dev/sd0iat/3c6905d2260afe09.i. fstab entry looks like3c6905d2260afe09.i /3c6905d2260afe09.i ffs rw,whatever_flags 0 0Ik bro, but having whole bunch of random numbers as mount point seems less intuitive to me.
well diskletters/numbers can change between boots and hardware configurations, and unless you have a good label for the partition, this is the only way I can think of to name your permanent mount points that isn’t problematic/incorrect in some other way. This will always work correctly with any amount of partitions with any amount of disks; and it’s not exactly hard to get the DUID of a disk, at least on OpenBSD. It’s also highly scriptable as such.
Thanks for the info.
With Linux filesystem hierarchies you’re going to run into a lot of history, conventions, quasi-standards and simply deprecated implementations.
It’s a problem of “there’s no bad way to do it so all options are equally fine”. From this arose some “guidelines” about /bin and /usr/bin, /var, etc. but few strict rules.
For a long time there was no /media. In the '90s/2000’s you would mount your CD-ROM and floppies in /mnt (e.g. /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/floppy). That was awkward as we started wanting auto-mounted things and wanted to do it from user-space. So /media/username was created to allow you to mount things with your ownership.
If it’s something you want permanently mounted but not part of a pool you can put it under any location you like really. I like locations under /var as historically /var is used for things that “vary”. You could just mount it in your $HOME if it’s something you’re going to use as a user rather than with a service.
I have a “/exports” dir for NFS mounts (e.g. /export/media, /export/storage, etc.). Just keeps it tidy and in one location.
The important thing is to use a standard that works for you and makes sense. There’s not a lot of bad places to mount things. If “/mnt” makes sense for you then go for it.
To piggy-back off of this, it’s not entirely uncommon to create another directory at root in enterprise environments, using /data or /application That said, I only do that for enterprise, for my personal computer, my distro defaulted to auto-mounting to a directory for each drive inside of /mnt, and I rather like that and intend to stick with it.
I know it is kinda frowned on but I like to use new directories at root to cut down on confusion as to where things are. Video storage for the NVR goes in /video, user data for Nextcloud goes in /data, etc. But I also keep everything in it’s own LXC so I don’t have one machine with 30 extra directories cluttering up the root.
Thank You.
Basically if I add it to my fstab it goes to /mnt. I let the system handle /media for usb etc
Anything I add to fstab gets mounted in
/mntand removable drives get auto mounted to/media. Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.
Thank You
I create /data and mount my 2nd drive there using fstab.
I then mount /data/downloads under my user downloads folder so everything goes to my 2nd drive. That way I dont have to redownload anything if I redo my main drive.
I do a similar thing with ~/Pictures and ~/Music, which are symlinked to my NextCloud Sync folder on my much larger second drive. It’s good for saving space on my main drive, too, as those two folders contain a lot of data.
Is NextCloud a cloud service like GDrive or a sync service ? Does it have a free tier? 😅
It’s like GDrive - except way more involved, you can do a lot with it. Files, office suite, photos, email, the works. There are hosts out there with various price points I’m sure, but I self-host so I can’t give any info on pricing I’m afraid.
I think I should learn about self-hosting asap.
It’s a wonderful thing if you can get a hang of it. Though fair warning, it’ll eat all your time for a fair while getting it set up 😂
time for a fair while getting it set up
That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Also for some reason lemmy seems to rarely duplicate some comments. Now I’m seeing two of your same comment and two of my same reply.
If I had to guess that’s gonna be a quirk of ActivityPub, and should self-resolve in a little bit, but I’m not an expert so don’t take me at my word there. I have some experience self-hosting setting up my own homelab over the last 2-3 years - if you’d like some “getting started” conversation, feel free to send me a DM or contact me on Matrix @darohan:tchncs.de
Good idea bro.
Idk, I mount my disks in /mnt/whatever, though I don’t think it matters where you mount them.
Thanks.
Mounting locations are a convention, not a standard, mount whatever you like wherever you like. In your case, I’d mount it under /mnt/ntfs, /mnt/windows if it a windows main partition you want visible, or by drive letter if it’s a secondary drive on a dual-boot system.
Or however you want. I would keep it under /mnt, but you don’t have to.
Do maybe sure you have user permissions set up properly if this is a multiuser machine though
Edit: also I would interpret
If /mnt is for temporary
‘temporary’ as in ‘may become unmounted without seriously fucking the system’
/ and /home aren’t temporary. Everywhere else is
‘temporary’ as in ‘may become unmounted without seriously fucking the system’
Thanks bro. Now it make sense.
In the past I’ve tended towards
/srv/*as most mounts end up being application specific storage.Though now it is all mounted as container volume storage.
I use /srv for all mu shared mounts for all the *arr’s
Isn’t
/srv/is for files from network or something ?container volume storage
What’s that ? 😅 Is that like LVM ?
Used to be an LVM group using the LVM docker volume driver. So every container volume became its own LV.
Now just a bunch of devices behind a btrfs volume mounted on
/var/lib/dockeror wherever.Thank you.
/srv is for “site-specific data which is served by this system.”
How to interpret that is up to for debate, but it seems clearly to be “user files” as opposed to “system files”. “Served” is a bit ambiguous but I don’t think it really requires that it be made accessible with an application service.
Basically I’d treat this as a location to mount/store your non-personal data such as music, videos, etc that should be accessible to anyone using your system. It could be network-exported as well but doesn’t have to be.
/net is for files imported from the network.
