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.
Mount your internal disks to /D:, /E:, /F:, etc.
That depends on your usecase.
I have setup servers where I mounted extra drives on /srv/nfs
When/If I switch to Linux I will probably mount my secondary drives to folders like
/home/stoy/videos
/home/stoy/music
/home/stoy/photos
/home/stoy/documents
/home/stoy/games
The ~/games will probably be an LVM since it contains little critical data and may absolutely need to be expanded to span several drives, though I would also be able to reduce the size of it and remove a drive from the LVM if needed.
I’d make a simple conky config to keep track of the drive space used
I’d just keep using the default automount spot for automounting drives.
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 suddenly remove one of the disks. What happen now?
Also can I add more disks to LVM later?
Yep, LVM is basically a software raid 0, I used it when setting up Linux server VMs for years at my last job, as far as I know they are still running fine.
The VM system backed up all VMs regularly, so I used LVMs as it made increasing the storage on a server easier for me.
Since it is just a raid 0 that can span several disks and one disk failiure can bring it down I don’t want any irriplacable data on it, so games from Steam seems like an excellwnt idea.
That also means that being able to just have a volume spanning several disks would be an easy and simple way to increase storage when space is running tight.
I am an avid hobby photographer and I would never trust an LVM without some kind of added protection, I am looking to get a Synology NAS with minimum of four drives raided in raid 5.
I have a very old Intel NAS with used drives that I used for many years, but I don’t trust it anymore, I keep it powered off as a cold backup.
My /home is also on a separate filesystem, so in principle I don’t like to mounting data under there, because then I cannot unmount /home (e.g. for fsck purposes) unless I unmount also all the other filesystems there. I keep all my filesystems on LVM.
So I just mount to /mnt and use symlinks.
Exception: sshfs I often mount to home.
So you suggest not to mount like the guy above said /home/stoy/videos ?
And suggest symlinks instead?
Yes, just mount to /mnt/videos and symlink that as needed.
I guess there are some benefits in mounting directly to , though, such as find/fd work “as expected”, and also permissions will be limited automatically per the permissions (but those can be adjusted manually).
For finding files I use plocate, though, so I wouldn’t get that marginal benefit from mounting below .
Use any you want. I’ve been mounting my internal secondary hard drive on /mnt for well over a year now and haven’t had any problems. Previously, I mounted it on ~/Storage and it also worked fine (though only because I’m the only user in my computer; dual-user systems would result in the other user being unable to access the hard drive).
Mount them where you need. Not /mnt and not /media. Maybe /var or its subdirectory, or /srv, or / depending on what kind of data you want to store on that partition.
Not
/mntand not/media
Why 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 /media exists. And /mnt is 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 /home partition, 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>/Movies etc. So you keep the logic of filesystem layout and don’t need to remember where you saved some file (in /home/<username>/Downloads or in /whatever-mountpoint-you-use/downloads).
Anything I add to fstab gets mounted in /mnt and removable drives get auto mounted to /media. Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.
