Where should I mount my internal drive partitions?

As far as I searched on the internet, I came to know that

/Media = mount point for removable media that system do it itself ( usb drive , CD )

/Mnt = temporarily mounting anything manually

I can most probably mount anything wherever I want, but if that’s the case what’s the point of /mnt? Just to be organised I suppose.

TLDR

If /mnt is for temporary and /media is for removable where should permanent non-removable devices/partitions be mounted. i.e. an internal HDD which is formatted as NTFS but needs to be automounted at startup?

Asking with the sole reason to know that, what’s the practice of user who know Linux well, unlike me.

I know this is a silly question but I asked anyway.

43 points
*

With Linux filesystem hierarchies you’re going to run into a lot of history, conventions, quasi-standards and simply deprecated implementations.

It’s a problem of “there’s no bad way to do it so all options are equally fine”. From this arose some “guidelines” about /bin and /usr/bin, /var, etc. but few strict rules.

For a long time there was no /media. In the '90s/2000’s you would mount your CD-ROM and floppies in /mnt (e.g. /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/floppy). That was awkward as we started wanting auto-mounted things and wanted to do it from user-space. So /media/username was created to allow you to mount things with your ownership.

If it’s something you want permanently mounted but not part of a pool you can put it under any location you like really. I like locations under /var as historically /var is used for things that “vary”. You could just mount it in your $HOME if it’s something you’re going to use as a user rather than with a service.

I have a “/exports” dir for NFS mounts (e.g. /export/media, /export/storage, etc.). Just keeps it tidy and in one location.

The important thing is to use a standard that works for you and makes sense. There’s not a lot of bad places to mount things. If “/mnt” makes sense for you then go for it.

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7 points

Thank You.

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5 points

To piggy-back off of this, it’s not entirely uncommon to create another directory at root in enterprise environments, using /data or /application That said, I only do that for enterprise, for my personal computer, my distro defaulted to auto-mounting to a directory for each drive inside of /mnt, and I rather like that and intend to stick with it.

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3 points

I know it is kinda frowned on but I like to use new directories at root to cut down on confusion as to where things are. Video storage for the NVR goes in /video, user data for Nextcloud goes in /data, etc. But I also keep everything in it’s own LXC so I don’t have one machine with 30 extra directories cluttering up the root.

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34 points

Anything I add to fstab gets mounted in /mnt and removable drives get auto mounted to /media. Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.

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11 points

Linux doesn’t care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.

Thank You

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27 points

Mount your internal disks to /D:, /E:, /F:, etc.

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6 points

🥇

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16 points

Idk, I mount my disks in /mnt/whatever, though I don’t think it matters where you mount them.

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2 points

Thanks.

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16 points
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Mounting locations are a convention, not a standard, mount whatever you like wherever you like. In your case, I’d mount it under /mnt/ntfs, /mnt/windows if it a windows main partition you want visible, or by drive letter if it’s a secondary drive on a dual-boot system.

Or however you want. I would keep it under /mnt, but you don’t have to.

Do maybe sure you have user permissions set up properly if this is a multiuser machine though

Edit: also I would interpret

If /mnt is for temporary

‘temporary’ as in ‘may become unmounted without seriously fucking the system’

/ and /home aren’t temporary. Everywhere else is

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3 points

‘temporary’ as in ‘may become unmounted without seriously fucking the system’

Thanks bro. Now it make sense.

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