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Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories

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  Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home  directories Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2016-11-12 19:20 +0100
    Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home  directories Lars Noodén <lars.nooden@gmail.com> - 2016-11-12 19:30 +0100
      Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home  directories Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2016-11-12 19:40 +0100
        Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home  directories Lars Noodén <lars.nooden@gmail.com> - 2016-11-12 20:20 +0100
    Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-11-13 05:50 +0100
      Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories rhkramer@gmail.com - 2016-11-13 14:10 +0100

#174592 — Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories

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Le duodi 22 brumaire, an CCXXV, Robert Menes a écrit :
> My question is this: which is the better path to take? Symlinking or hard
> linking another drive to ~/Music and ~/Videos? I understand that I
> will need to edit /etc/fstab and all; that's fine. Just curious as to
> whether symlinks or hard links are the way to go.

You can not do hardlinks across different filesystems, so that part is
settled.

You could not do hardlinks on directories either, you would have to work
plain file per plain file. That would be a pain.

You could use bind mounts, but I really do not recommend it.

I suggest mounting the extra storage somewhere like /data and using
symlinks; that is what I do.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George

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#174595

On 11/12/2016 08:15 PM, Nicolas George wrote:
[snip]
> You could use bind mounts, but I really do not recommend it.
[snip]

What are the disadvantages of bind mounts?

Regards,
Lars

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#174598

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Le duodi 22 brumaire, an CCXXV, Lars Noodén a écrit :
> What are the disadvantages of bind mounts?

They require root privileges for any change.

They are also more expensive than any individual symlink, but it does
not matter much if there are only a few.

But I can reverse the question: what advantages do you see to bind
mounts in that particular circumstance?

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#174601

On 11/12/2016 08:30 PM, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le duodi 22 brumaire, an CCXXV, Lars Nood�n a �crit�:
>> What are the disadvantages of bind mounts?
> 
> They require root privileges for any change.
> 
> They are also more expensive than any individual symlink, but it does
> not matter much if there are only a few.
> 
> But I can reverse the question: what advantages do you see to bind
> mounts in that particular circumstance?

It fits with the /etc/fstab approach, and since Robert mentioned
/etc/fstab mount comes to mind.  Adding the user option there allows a
non-root user to mount or unmount the pair of directories.  However, as
far as technical advantages proper, I don't know.

Regards,
Lars

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#174626 — Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories

On Sat 12 Nov 2016 at 19:15:29 (+0100), Nicolas George wrote:
> Le duodi 22 brumaire, an CCXXV, Robert Menes a écrit :
> > My question is this: which is the better path to take? Symlinking or hard
> > linking another drive to ~/Music and ~/Videos? I understand that I
> > will need to edit /etc/fstab and all; that's fine. Just curious as to
> > whether symlinks or hard links are the way to go.
> 
> You can not do hardlinks across different filesystems, so that part is
> settled.
> 
> You could not do hardlinks on directories either, you would have to work
> plain file per plain file. That would be a pain.
> 
> You could use bind mounts, but I really do not recommend it.
> 
> I suggest mounting the extra storage somewhere like /data and using
> symlinks; that is what I do.

I agree with all that, but I avoid making symlinks. If I do a
recursive search of my home directory, there's really no point
in trawling through 300GB of photographs, so they're all under
/home/photos. I put them under /home just to avoid adding
directories to / but they're not users in the normal sense:
I own all the files. Similarly video, sound etc.

Cheers,
David.

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#174645 — Re: Symlinking or hard linking additional storage to /home directories

On Saturday, November 12, 2016 11:45:12 PM David Wright wrote:
> I agree with all that, but I avoid making symlinks. If I do a
> recursive search of my home directory, there's really no point
> in trawling through 300GB of photographs, so they're all under
> /home/photos. I put them under /home just to avoid adding
> directories to / but they're not users in the normal sense:
> I own all the files. Similarly video, sound etc.

Just to suggest another alternative, I put all of what I call my "real user 
data" (that is things like photos, documents, ...) under a different top level 
directory with subdirectories like the following:

/rhk <my user id>
/rhk/photos
/rhk/documents
...

I do this to, among other things, separate user configuration data (typically 
hidden in /home/rhk) from "real user data".  Before I did that, I used to do 
some dumb things.  One of the things that is easy to do is move my "real user 
data" to other machines with no worry about messing up user configuration data 
on such other machines.

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