Backups and automount

[HisDudeness]

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.

• 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?

Thanks everyone!

[viking777]

Don't clone anything, back up to image files - these cannot be mounted, only restored. The problem therefore has gone away, but you still have the bakups and you still have automount.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=124636

[HisDudeness]

Oh, thanks. That is indeed a killer backup solution. My whole Windows childhood did put some diffidence deep inside in me towards standard backup/restore software, but I'd say now this psychological damage is solved!

As for disabling automount for a specific partition of a USB drive? I still have one I don't want my system to mount and me to unmount everytime... if it is a solution which makes the partition manual-mounting dependent in general, making it not mounting on its own for each system I plug it in, it would be perfect. I tried adding the hidden flag via GParted, but it won't do it. But also if it is some kind of information I add only to my LMDE system, that would do anyway. It's an NTFS partition.

[viking777]

I've said it before and I say it again here. As far as I am concerned usb automount is the work of the devil and should be forever banned from the world of computers. I can tell you how to achieve that if you want, but that is probably not the answer you are looking for - basically with regard to automount I am the wrong person to talk to - sorry.

[HisDudeness]

Well, that wasn't my initial intention, but could be a very nice idea, actually. Most of the times I also work with USB sticks to burn disk images such as live distributions into those, meaning I have to revolution their partition setup, hence unmount those immediately after plugging them in to use GParted. Also, if I have a drive with a lot of different partitions, I'll probably have to work with just one of them, which can be a different one from time to time depending on the particular situation, which translates into an unsuitableness of automount. After all, isn't Linux all about almost 100% manual processes, freedom of choice and complete decision-making power?
So, if you may, I'd be much grateful if you could tell me howto, maybe linking me to a sticky or previous post you probably made. I could surely google about it, but as far as I know for almost all problems there's more than just one solution, and I'd like to know the one it's best for you,as you surely got some experience about this matter.

[viking777]

I am always glad to relieve people from the tyranny of automount, so here goes.

First you need dconf-editor. That is part of the package dconf-tools so if you haven't got that package installed (and it is not there by default) pop along to synaptic or the software manager whichever you use and search for and install that package.

Once it is installed search for, and launch dconf-editor from the main menu.

Then drill down the menus as follows: dconf-editor>org>gnome>desktop>media-handling. Click on this entry. In the right hand pane you will see that automount (and possibly automount-open) are checked - uncheck them. For good measure I also make sure that autorun-never is checked but you may find that a step too far - that is up to you (it prevents autorun/autostart on cd's as well as usb keys).

I just noticed that you are using LMDE. I'm not, but I don't think the instructions will differ.

[HisDudeness]

Oh, it was simpler than I hoped, just a dconf issue. Thanks a lot! I already had the autorun-never box checked, probably because I told the system (via System Settings>Details>Removable Media) to "Never prompt or start programs on media insertion", I am naturally allergic to autoplays, I remember how Windows massacred my external hard drives every time just to check the nature of its content and discover once again it's mixed, before then asking me what to do (or opening random unwanted programs as soon as I got a disk in the optical drive).

Thanks a lot, I'm definitely happier this way. Guess I can mark this post as solved, even if I deviated a little from my initial idea. Even if most of my starting questions are nt answered, my essential problem is no more, and the questions are now useless!