On 08/21/2017 07:23 PM, Fred Smith wrote: > so, in my case, the USB drive contains an xfs filesystem. would I > do something like this: > > in /etc/auto.master: > backup /etc/auto.backup > > and in /etc/auto.backup > backup -fstype=xfs,defaults,noauto,users :UUID=09bfc97a-8db2-46de-b4dd-427da19b114 In auto.master, the first field is a directory, so it should be "/backup". Debian's documentation says you shouldn't need to prefix UUID with a ':', so remove that from auto.backup if the configuration you described doesn't work. Alternatively, you could specify its location as ":/dev/disk/by-uuid/<the disk id>".