this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
124 points (97.7% liked)

Linux

50727 readers
1294 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

If they’re internal drives then you choose.

I like to mount drives at root, their parent directory being the logical purpose of the drive.

Got a drive you added that’s gonna be for games?

/games

Is it for movies?

/movies

Or maybe it’s just general data storage?

/data

No need to make it more complicated than it has to be.

This is standard across the industry, unless you are mounting disks that would conform to another strategy (say it’s a drive of repos, it might mounted under /usr/local/src/ as that’s where one would expect user provided source code).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

No need to make it more complicated than it has to be.

Thank You.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I decided to simply create directories within /mnt, chmod 000 them and use them as fixed mountpoints;
for manual temporary mounts I have /mnt/a, /mnt/b, ... /mnt/f, but I never needed to use more than two of them at once.

While this setup doesn't really respect the filesystem hierarchy, I wouldn't have used /mnt at all if I were constrained by its standard purpose since having one available manual mountpoint seems pretty limiting to me.
Then again, I have 3 physical drives with ~ 10 partitions, plus one removable drive with its own dedicated mountpoint...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

chmod 000

What does this do? I'm a Meganoob.

Fixed mountpoints

?

having one available manual mountpoint

you mean the whole /mnt is meant to single mount point?

Sorry for all the questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Adding to what the other comment explained:

I use chown 000 so that regular users fail to access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it; in practice it never happens, because "regular users" = { me }, but I like being pedantic.

As for /mnt, it is supposed to be a single temp. mountpoint, but I use it as the parent directory of multiple mountpoints some of which are just for temporary use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I use chown 000 so that regular users fail to access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it

My dummy brain can't understand it man.

Isn't someone can't access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it the default behaviour?

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I myself have separate /Disks folder where I mount all my internal disks on boot. Not sure how "standard" such setup is, but it helped me keep my NTFS and Linux disks tidy and out of my way. For what I know you can mount your drives anywhere you like

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

If I remember correctly mnt is for static media that you expect to always be present and media is for removable media which may come and go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This makes sense.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›