this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

I think tooling only cares for partitions. So /home and / are usually runtime-critical (can be on different disks or network storage), while internal data disks count as removable, since you can unmount their partitions.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

/mnt is for anything and everything. /media doesn't even exist on Arch based distros and maybe others.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

/mnt is not for everything, it is a temporary mount point. For fixed drives that are constantly mounted you should use another location (that could be anywhere in the filesystem tree).

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

My Files, which are inside the partition mounted in /mnt/something has root as Owner. So When I try to move something to Trash, it's not allowing me to do, Only perma delete. When saw properties it said owner is root.

Is it because mounted at /mnt?

Files under /media seems fine. and says it's owner is 'me'

IDK if I'm doing anything wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I used to mount network attached storage in /mnt until I had problems accessing it from a Snap. In searching for a solution it was pointed out that snaps are correct in being sandboxed from these types of folders, and users like myself are making things difficult for ourselves by using those system folders.

They said the best practice would be to mount them in a folder in your home directory. I've switched to doing that and it works great.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

/[UUID or PART-UUID].[partition number/letter]

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

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