Re: mounting USB disk

[<briand@aracnet.com>]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:13:47 +1000
Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Tony van der Hoff wrote:
> > Runnung Squeeze here. I have a script which runs nightly, to backup 
> > certain directories to a USB disk, which does a fine job, provided the 
> > disk is mounted.
> 
> Why not run blkid and if you find the "right" device by it's UUID, then 
> mount it in your backup script.  Do the backup and then umount the device.
> 
> If the right device is not found, report that and quit the script.
> 
> Using the UUID via blkid is important because you want to be sure you 
> have the right backup device.  A little harder if you have multiple USBs 
> for the backup, but then you could cater all of your known UUIDs
> 

Another way that works well is to give the disk a label.

the fstab can then refer to it by label :

LABEL=backup /mnt/backup ext3 noauto,users 0 0

you can then simply grep the mount command with no arguments to see if it's there and mount it if not:

if ! mount | grep -q ${BACKDIR}
then
    mount ${BACKDIR}
fi


HTH.

Brian