[gentoo-user] Re: Mounting a big drive for stuff - /mnt or /media

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

On 08/05/2009 05:12 PM, Stroller wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm in the process of commissioning a box which has a large hard drive
> on which videos, mp3s & stuff will be stored.
>
> On all my other machines, such drives are mounted at /mnt/space (and a
> second drive at /mnt/morespace)
>
> I have a notion to move to a hierarchy under /media/ - something like
> /media/space or /media/videos or /media/disk1, /media/disk2,
> /media/disk3, ...
>
> I can't remember WHY I came iup with this idea, however...

Gnome, for example, automatically mounts removable media on /media.
I don't know if that default can even be changed, and I never bothered
to find out.

You are right that /mnt is a very old unix standard directory and new
fangled applications like auto-mounting desktops (i.e. gnome) should
not be messing with it because some older app may come along and mount
right on top of your already mounted filesystem.  Very confusing!

Using the good old SWAG method, I'd say that the much newer OpenDesktop
group probably designated /media as the newfangled replacement for /mnt.
Anyone know for sure?

If you plan to mount your data partition (or whatever) so that it will
always be in exactly the same place, then you should create a new mount
point of your own and mount your partition there using /etc/fstab.

Where you put the new mount point depends on whether the filesystem is
to be available to all users of the machine, or just you.