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Mounting Folders VS Symlinks? (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 months ago by gpstarman@lemmy.today to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I have a NTFS drive for Storage, which is shared between Win 11.

I want to change the location of (or replace) ~/Downloads, ~/Music, etc..,.

Note that the link to made is between NTFS and EXT4.

I found two ways while searching.

   1.Creating **Symlinks** in `~` with target pointed to folders in NTFS drive.

   2. **Mounting** the NTFS folders **directly** to`~/Downloads`, `~/Music`, etc..,.

Which one should I do? Which one is more beneficial?

Also how to mount folders to other folders (option 2) ? (I would really appreciate a GUI way)

I know this is not that important of a thing to post on Main Linux Community, but I already asked 2 linux4noobs community, and they are empty.

This is a continuation to my previous discussion, where most of the people said,

  1. It doesn't matter where I mount.

  2. Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)

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[-] Samueru@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

would you suggest XDG or creating Symlinks?

You can do both, and both are easy.

The user-dirs.dirs file contains something like this:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

For example if you mount the disk in /media/dirname, it would be something like this, I'm giving it a external-drive name in this example:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="/media/external-drive/Desktop"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/external-drive/Documents"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/external-drive/Downloads"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/media/external-drive/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="/media/external-drive/Pictures"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="/media/external-drive/Public"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="/media/external-drive/Templates"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/media/external-drive/Videos"

And for the symlinks, if the drive already has the Desktop, Documents, etc directories. It is as simple as this:

ln -s /media/external-drive/* $HOME

That will symlink all the files in the drive to your $HOME

I suggest you do both because you might run into a program that doesn't follow XDG user directories.

[-] gpstarman@lemmy.today 2 points 2 months ago

Thank you.

this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
25 points (96.3% liked)

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