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/media or /mnt or anywhere ? Discussion.

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.

Nibodhika ,

Permanent drives should be put wherever you want them to, for example I have mine mounted in /ld1 for Large Disk 1. /media is supposed to be used by systems to mount things you plug, but some systems move that to /var/run/media or other places. /mnt is there so you don’t have to create a folder in case you want to mount something really quick.

gpstarman OP ,

Thanks man.

odc ,

Mount your internal disks to /D:, /E:, /F:, etc.

gpstarman OP ,

🥇

Heavybell ,
@Heavybell@lemmy.world avatar

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.

gpstarman OP ,

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?

Heavybell ,
@Heavybell@lemmy.world avatar

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.

stoy ,

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.

flux ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

So you suggest not to mount like the guy above said /home/stoy/videos ?

And suggest symlinks instead?

gpstarman OP ,

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?

stoy ,

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.

Presi300 ,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

Idk, I mount my disks in /mnt/whatever, though I don’t think it matters where you mount them.

gpstarman OP ,

Thanks.

deadbeef79000 ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

Isn’t /srv/ is for files from network or something ?

container volume storage

What’s that ? 😅 Is that like LVM ?

deadbeef79000 ,

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/docker or wherever.

gpstarman OP ,

Thank you.

Hawke , (edited )

/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 a network 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.

gpstarman OP ,

Thank you.

xenspidey ,

I use /srv for all mu shared mounts for all the *arr’s

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

Actually since their permanent non-removable tribes, I would say wherever you replace them, if they’re meant primarily for storing user-based data you can do like what I used to do which was store them in within the home directory just as specific names. Like my old setup before I went proxmox was /backups was my backup drive, /home was my home drive that stored most of my users /home/steam held all my game server drive and /home/storage held my long term cold storage drive.

gpstarman OP ,

Thanks man. I think I’ll stick to this.

Revan343 , (edited )

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

gpstarman OP ,

‘temporary’ as in ‘may become unmounted without seriously fucking the system’

Thanks bro. Now it make sense.

possiblylinux127 ,

/mydrive

oldfart ,

That’s what I do, /music

possiblylinux127 ,

Thanks you, /oldfart

gpstarman OP ,

Thank You.

SimplyTadpole ,
@SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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).

gpstarman OP ,

Thanks bro.

bizdelnick ,

Mount them where you need. Not /mnt and not /media. Maybe /var or its subdirectory, or /srv, or /opt depending on what kind of data you want to store on that partition.

gpstarman OP ,

Not /mnt and not /media

Why though?

what kind of data

Just media files, downloads, images , music kinda stuff.

bizdelnick ,

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).

gpstarman OP ,

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

Thanks bro. I think that’s what I’m gonna do.

KISSmyOS ,

My second and third internal drive are mounted to /home/username/datagrave and /home/username/backup .
I see no reason why I shouldn’t do it this way.

electric_nan ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

Thanks for the heads up.

gpstarman OP ,

I have no idea man. Seems fine though.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Backups copy from backups to backups from backups to backups. Disk full.

Revan343 ,

Use borg

gpstarman OP ,

Can you please elaborate?

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Infinite recursion. If you backup data in your home dir, then you probably don’t want your backups mounted inside your home Dir.

lazylion_ca ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

Good idea bro.

Darohan ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

Is NextCloud a cloud service like GDrive or a sync service ? Does it have a free tier? 😅

Darohan ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

I think I should learn about self-host asap.

Darohan ,

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 😂

gpstarman OP ,

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.

Darohan ,

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

cmnybo ,

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.

gpstarman OP ,

Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.

Thank You

CMDR_Horn ,

Basically if I add it to my fstab it goes to /mnt. I let the system handle /media for usb etc

gpstarman OP ,

Thank You.

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