Backups and automount
Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2013 11:06 am
Good morning everyone! Here I am again, with a newbie question.
I have an old external hard drive, which I use to store things I don't need to carry around (I have a portable one for that), and to backup my system from time to time just in case I severely screw everything up. The problem is, I made that backup in a radical (and probably horrible) way: freed enough space, shrank the principal storage partition, and cloned my system one in the new unpartitioned space via GParted Live. Thus, the backup partition's got the same UUID, and this causes some minor problems. Id est, everytime I connect the hard drive to work on the storage partition, the backup one automounts, which means (looking from GParted's icons) mounts as / in place of my local system one. I don't know if it's a false alarm due to the fact that the two partitions share the same UUID, and so GParted gets fooled and displays the external one mounted as /, but just in the eventuality the fact may actually happen I guess it's better solving this. Making some order, here's what I ask.
I have an old external hard drive, which I use to store things I don't need to carry around (I have a portable one for that), and to backup my system from time to time just in case I severely screw everything up. The problem is, I made that backup in a radical (and probably horrible) way: freed enough space, shrank the principal storage partition, and cloned my system one in the new unpartitioned space via GParted Live. Thus, the backup partition's got the same UUID, and this causes some minor problems. Id est, everytime I connect the hard drive to work on the storage partition, the backup one automounts, which means (looking from GParted's icons) mounts as / in place of my local system one. I don't know if it's a false alarm due to the fact that the two partitions share the same UUID, and so GParted gets fooled and displays the external one mounted as /, but just in the eventuality the fact may actually happen I guess it's better solving this. Making some order, here's what I ask.
- Which, for you, is the best way to backup the whole system? Is cloning the partition with GParted a wise idea? Is it important to keep the UUID, so that if I have to restore some previous situation I just overwrite the system partition and make the system believe nothing ever changed? Or is there a better way?
- Does in your opinion the cloned root really automount everytime in place of my system one? Is there a way to understand this for sure? And how can I avoid this? Is it enough to change UUID? Or do I have again to keep it in order to make my backup effective?
- I also have another backupped system (not-LMDE) on my external drive, which obviously gets automounted too everytime I plug it in. I'd prefer not, since I don't need it and everytime my computer must do some useless extra job, while I must unmount a useless extra partition too, before plugging it out. Which to you is the best way to avoid this, while keeping all my other USB devices (and the storage partition of my external HDD) normally automount when plugged in?