You can copy using “cp”. Example…cp filename /home1. Or you can configure your browser to save doanloads to /home1. Just remember that if the drive is not mounted it will cause an error. You might want to check your /etc/fstab file to insure that the mounting takes place at boot time.
i think what has me a little confused is that when i do save something to /home1 (which was created in my home directory) and i unmount sdb1 (umount /dev/sdb1), i can still access what is in /home1…
my thought is that if i unmount the drive i shouldn’t be able to access whatever is on the drive, correct?
Exactly. But when your partition is not mounted on /home1, /home1 is stil a directory. And you can write files / create dirctories in a directory, can’t you?
But when you then mount again, all that is in that directory becomes unreachable, because now the partition is there.
Many system managers create a file in such a directory (that is intended to be a mount point) with a name like
This-is-the-mount-point-of-sdb3
or another usefull alert message, so you can immedeatly see it when the partition is not mounted.
Well that’s the way it works on my system. Once a drive is unmounted it is no longer part of your file system. But something puzzles me. You say that your mount point is /home1 but that it was “created in my home directory”. Normally your home directory would be /home/username in which case your mount point would be /home/username/home1. Are you sure you haven’t created two mount points one being /home1 and the other /home/username/home1?
If you invoke the “mount” command without parameters you will see if /dev/sdb1 is mounted to more than one mount point.
I think you need a little more understanding of the mount process. When a disk
partition is mounted “over” a directory on your / partition, the original
contents of that directory become hidden. For example on my system, I have a
Ubuntu distribution on partition /dev/sda1 that is normally mounted on /ubuntu.
When it is mounted, the command ‘ls /ubuntu’ shows all the directories of the
root of a distro. Once it is unmounted, the ‘ls /ubuntu’ command shows nothing.
If I now create a file there using ‘touch /ubuntu/junk’, it will show up in the
listing; however, if the partition is remounted, the file ‘junk’ is hidden - it
still occupies disk space in my / partition, but I cannot get to it.