I’ve read a number of articles and thread on this subject but none really seems to agree. I’ve read that Linux tends to use /media or /mnt as the location to temporarily mount external drives or partitions but that if editing fstab, it’s best to avoid these so that there isn’t any potential overlap to cause issues.
Is there a standard or best practices location that one should put drives that will be permanently automounted to the system? Or does it really not matter? I’m just trying to get things up properly from the start.
Thanks so much in advance! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Basicaly you can mount a file system at any place you want. A mount point is a directory. Thus wherever there is a directory, you can mount. You can of course create that directory when it is not in the place you want (better use an empty directory though).
That said, you may now understand that the what you want the file system for is deciding. When you want it to put all end-users data on, you will mount on /home (which is probably already the case on your system). When you have a database you want a separate file system for, mount on /database. When you run a web server with a lot of pages, make a separate file system of /srv/www. When you have a user with a lot of music files, you could give hime a separate file system for it on /home/<username>/Music and thus ofload all the music file from the /home file system.
So, first explain what you want to use the file system for. Maybe then you will see the obvious place. Else, explain here and ask for advice bases on your more specific whishes.
Oh, and btw, forget that talking about “external devices”. The system has no concept of “external devices”. IMHO it is a term left-over from MS-Windows parlance.
Best practices is using system defaults. But based on your preferences you can decide otherwise for special cases. When the Forerunner 310XT passed away I bought a 735XT:
