There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Mounting Folders VS Symlinks?

I have a NTFS drive for Storage, which is shared between Win 11.

I want to change the location of (or replace) ~/Downloads, ~/Music, etc…,.

Note that the link to made is between NTFS and EXT4.

I found two ways while searching.


<span style="color:#323232;">   1.Creating **Symlinks** in `~` with target pointed to folders in NTFS drive.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">   2. **Mounting** the NTFS folders **directly** to`~/Downloads`, `~/Music`, etc..,.
</span>

Which one should I do? Which one is more beneficial?

Also how to mount folders to other folders (option 2) ? (I would really appreciate a GUI way)

I know this is not that important of a thing to post on Main Linux Community, but I already asked 2 linux4noobs community, and they are empty.

This is a continuation to my previous discussion, where most of the people said,

  1. It doesn’t matter where I mount.
  2. Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)
fuzzy_feeling ,

a lot of good answers here:
askubuntu.com/…/what-is-the-difference-between-ln…

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

Not related to your question exactly, but if you want certain “special” folders (Downloads, Music etc.) to be in specific places, it might be worth setting up xdg data dirs to the appropriate location.

wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

neidu2 ,

Seconding this. As it’s a mount that is explicitly for your user, you might as well mount it where it’s most convenient for you.

If, on the other hand, it was a mountpoint for the entire system, I’d keep it in /mnt and go the symlink route - I’m old fashioned, and I like to use /mnt for as much as possible. I find it more tidy that way. On that note, I’m not 100% sold on /media yet

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

For data like this from another filesystem I usually like to mount the entire volume somewhere private like /run and then bind mount the parts I want to use into their desired locations (like /home/foo/Download, etc.)

I do this with a second ext4 drive that I use for performance sensitive storage with my primary btrfs system root. It works well, just be aware of edge cases involving containers (you may have to grant the container access to the original mount location under /run as well as the bound path.)

aBundleOfFerrets ,

I don’t think this is a bad question at all, personally I would prefer to mount the drive once and symlink folders for a couple reasons:

  1. It’s easier to automate
  2. it’s theoretically faster (to initialize) as symlinks are effectively free
  3. I personally like symlink syntax more than mount syntax :P

One possible con to symlinks is that certain (linux native) software can misbehave when it has to interact with them, but this is a fairly uncommon issue. Stuff ran through wine or proton should support them just fine, as they are abstracted away.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

bind mounts don’t usually have the problems that symlinks do. The only time I’ve had issues involve container systems like docker or flatpak.

eager_eagle , (edited )
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

afaik you can’t mount folders, only drives. So what you’re looking for are symlinks (symbolic links, as opposed to hard links; use e.g. ln -s <source> ~/Downloads). I have a few in my $HOME pointing to other drives as well.

if your NTFS drive is unmounted or unavailable, the link will be broken; but you won’t have to recreate it in the future: so it’s a “set and forget” operation for as long as the path the link points to remains the same.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •