Re: Mounting a USB device
Hi Mick
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On Mon, 2 Nov 2020 at 21:25, Mick Ab <recoverymail123890@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks very much, David, for your suggestions. I appreciate that very much. My knowledge of Linux is gleaned from various online articles and Linux forums I have seen over the past few years. I know very little,
> if anything, about the internal workings of Linux. Most of the debian-user posts that I see are way above my head.
>
> I just need to know sufficient Linux/Debian to enable a desktop to run okay on a Debian system. If any problem arises beyond my knowledge/
> experience I seek online help from various Linux or general computer forums.
>
> Backups of the current system to a portable NTFS drive in a USB 3 port have been done on a regular basis for many months.
>
> Problems started when a mount of the drive failed. After a lot of investigation, it is now considered that the failure was due to a loose
> connection in the USB 3 port. Also, the drive was corrupted.
>
> So a backup was attempted using a new NTFS portable drive in another port. This caused further problems because the automatic mounting system in use (usbmount) was not understood.
>
> I think i understand the workings of usbmount better now and have a plan to ensure a backup of the system goes well.
>
> The usbmount system automatically mounts NTFS and FAT32 devices at boot up. These devices are already plugged in at boot up and have entries in /etc/fstab. It appears that usbmount does not check
> /etc/fstab for the noauto option.
On Mon, 2 Nov 2020 at 21:25, Mick Ab <recoverymail123890@gmail.com> wrote:
> Backups of the current system to a portable NTFS drive in a
> USB 3 port have been done on a regular basis for many months.
Ok, well I certainly don't want to break what's working for you.
But it seems you have been having some reliability issues, so
it seems reasonable to have a conversation about those ...
Can you describe for us how you do these backups?
What tools or commands are you running?
> Problems started when a mount of the drive failed.
> After a lot of investigation, it is now considered that the failure
> was due to a loose connection in the USB 3 port.
> Also, the drive was corrupted.
> So a backup was attempted using a new NTFS portable
> drive in another port. This caused further problems because
> the automatic mounting system in use (usbmount) was
> not understood.
FAT* and NTFS are second-class citizens on Linux.
They should only be used where necessary for compatibility
with other computer systems.
They will lack features and performance.
Their drivers will be slower, less reliable and more prone to
errors.
I would use the ext4 filesystem for what I imagine you are doing,
that you haven't fully explained yet :) How do you do your backups?
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