File location question

[MurphCID]

How do you in linux, change where a file is stored? For example, on my Windows box I have five drives, a boot drive, a game drive, a storage drive, and two backup drives. I have documents, music, videos, and pictures going to my "E" drive. Instead of loading on the "C" drive, I have them pointed to the "E" drive. It was really easy to do that in Windows, but I am not sure how to have a linux boot drive, and point it to my storage drive. I am still somewhat unsure of the linux drive conventions so I am afraid of zorching my file system. On my windows system, my boot drive is a single 512 gb Western Digital NVMe drive, and the storage drive is a 2 terabyte Western Digital 7200 rpm drive. The game drive is a 500 gb Samsung SSD and that is where I have all of my Steam games loaded. I want to be able to load games and such onto the other drives, and "point" to them so that linux can find them. Can anyone give me easy directions on how to do this?

[catweazel]

I move my trash locations like this:

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ln -s /media/boot/HWRAID10-0/Trash /home/boot/.local/share/Trash

So, move your files to where you want them then use this format to create a link:

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ln -s <dest> <source>

<dest> points to where you moved the directory to and <source> creates a link where you moved the directory from.

[jglen490]

How do you in linux, change where a file is stored? For example, on my Windows box I have five drives, a boot drive, a game drive, a storage drive, and two backup drives. I have documents, music, videos, and pictures going to my "E" drive. Instead of loading on the "C" drive, I have them pointed to the "E" drive. It was really easy to do that in Windows, but I am not sure how to have a linux boot drive, and point it to my storage drive. I am still somewhat unsure of the linux drive conventions so I am afraid of zorching my file system. On my windows system, my boot drive is a single 512 gb Western Digital NVMe drive, and the storage drive is a 2 terabyte Western Digital 7200 rpm drive. The game drive is a 500 gb Samsung SSD and that is where I have all of my Steam games loaded. I want to be able to load games and such onto the other drives, and "point" to them so that linux can find them. Can anyone give me easy directions on how to do this?

The easy way is through using partitioning to set up your Linux. You can partition a single physical drive, or you can have some of your partitions on one drive, and some on another. What I have on my system is two physical drives set up like this:
/ = /dev/sda1
/home = /dev/sda2
/SWAP = /dev/sda3
/home/multimedia = /dev/sdb1

So while /home is split over two physical drives, I can use my backup process to grab everything under "/home" in one command while keeping my interest areas in two places.

I have three external USB drives that I use for backups and connect each on a rotating basis to do my actual backups. No matter which physical drive I'm using at the time for the backup, it always shows up as being mounted as "/dev/sdc" but with the label of the drive showing in the GUI file explorer (i.e., Backup1, Backup2, or Backup3).

You can tell the application program exactly what subdirectory to put a document or an MP3 file in.

[MurphCID]

Thanks I am still unsure on the concept, so please bear with me.

If I have a 512gb boot drive (sba?)which I want to keep "clean" for the most part and only have the o/s, and applications on, and a 2 TB regular hard drive (sdb?) where I want all the documents, music, videos, games, etc to be stored, how would I link those two so it happens? In Windows I just tell the file location to be E:\ rather than C, and voila! no problemo.

[shawnhcorey]

How do you in linux, change where a file is stored? For example, on my Windows box I have five drives, a boot drive, a game drive, a storage drive, and two backup drives. I have documents, music, videos, and pictures going to my "E" drive. Instead of loading on the "C" drive, I have them pointed to the "E" drive. It was really easy to do that in Windows, but I am not sure how to have a linux boot drive, and point it to my storage drive. I am still somewhat unsure of the linux drive conventions so I am afraid of zorching my file system. On my windows system, my boot drive is a single 512 gb Western Digital NVMe drive, and the storage drive is a 2 terabyte Western Digital 7200 rpm drive. The game drive is a 500 gb Samsung SSD and that is where I have all of my Steam games loaded. I want to be able to load games and such onto the other drives, and "point" to them so that linux can find them. Can anyone give me easy directions on how to do this?

When you install Linux, it will automatically look for all drives and place them on your desktop. They wouldn't be labelled 'C:' or 'E:'. Instead, the name will be taken from their firmware, that is, what the manufactured names them. There is no simple way to change their labels in Linux because doing so requires root (admin) privileges.

[MurphCID]

I understand, but if I want documents, music and photos to be on the 2 tb drive, and the 512 gb is my o/s drive, how do I do that in linux?

[smurphos]

To avoid messing to much you can move/copy the folders/files in question to the chosen location first, using the file manager and a simple cut or copy and paste or using the command line and a tool like mv, cp or rsync.

Then use the file manager (for Nemo right click on the folder in the new location and use the Make Link option then move and rename the new Link to folder) or the command line tool ln to create symlinks in your home that point to the new locations.

An example one liner terminal command that moves the folder ~/TEST and it's contents from home to my back-up external drive and creates a symlink in home to the new location.

mv ~/TEST /mnt/backup_drive/TEST && ln -s /mnt/backup_drive/TEST ~/

If you want to move the whole home folder to the other drive we need to see how your drives are mounted now? blkid && cat /etc/fstab
will tell us.

[shawnhcorey]

I understand, but if I want documents, music and photos to be on the 2 tb drive, and the 512 gb is my o/s drive, how do I do that in linux?

Most apps will remember where you open and saved during your last session. For example, if you open your music app and load a file from a directory on the 2 TB drive, the next time your start the app, it should remember where it was and set the open dialog to the same directory.

Of course, this is for most apps. Some do not do this. All I can say is to try it and if it doesn't behave as you expect, then ask for more help.

[MurphCID]

Thanks.