--On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 12:58 AM -0400 Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
The problem is this: you also need some way to unmount the disk. And for FAT file systems, you need to somehow map the ownership. The GUI does the mount in the logged in user and the [GNome] desktop icon includes a right-click menu with an 'eject' / 'unmount' item.
In my case they're all magnetics with ext3 logical drives, so they show up with labels.
My practice has been to label them "Backup1", "Backup2", etc. and then "mount /dev/disk/by-label/Backup1 /mnt/Backup1". Or list all the possibilities in /etc/fstab so I can just name the mount point in the mount command.
An additional complication is that some USB drives spin down after some idle time, and don't spin back up when accessed, leading to errors and FS corruption. I've used "hdparam -s 0 --prefer-ata12 /dev/sdb" (for example) but some drives ignore that, so I end up needing to start a script that touches a file and sync's every few seconds.