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Mounting Folders VS Symlinks? (lemmy.today)

submitted 3 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,

It doesn't matter where I mount.
Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)

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[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Folders? you mean directories 👀

Mount the disk (if you ask me at /media/nameofdir) and configure ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs (99% of that time that would be the .config dir in your home lol) and define each XDG_***_DIR= to the respective directory in the path of the mounted disk, no need to make symlinks, though you might need to because there is likely many apps that don't follow xdg specs.

I would really appreciate a GUI way

I know gnome-disks has a GUI way to change the mount options, I don't know how good it is though.

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Thank You.

would you suggest XDG or creating Symlinks?

Found this just for you. https://lemmy.world/post/1352601

[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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 3 months ago

Thank you.