Thanks for the tips. /"//I thought you had to use NTFS-3g to write to NTFS.  Also, don't these things have labels?  It's much more readable and simpler to mount a thing with a label than a UUID if you can. //" /I used the UUID based on a Pluralsight course I watched on Raspberry Pi. I like it better than a label, since labels can be easily changed (esp. in Windows) whereas a partition UUID would only change if the drive were re-partitioned (highly unlikely). And I'm not terribly concerned about "unsightly-ness" in a config file (a simple comment will tell me what it is).  I have the ntfs-3g package loaded and the mount -t ntfs is actually using ntfs-3g behind the scenes. /"Backup script should check whether the disks are mounted or not? "/ Any suggestions on how I could check whether a drive is mounted? Some kind of combination of lsblk & grep?? Thanks Peter On 9/9/2020 3:52 PM, Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss wrote: >> AZ Pete via PLUG-discuss wrote: >>> However, currently I have to manually mount each of the external >>> drives. This isn't a terribly big issue since the drives are >>> rotated to offsite storage only once per month. But, if the Pi >>> gets rebooted, the drives are not being auto-mounted and the >>> backups will then fail. > > Backup script should check whether the disks are mounted or not? But read on. > >>> /etc/fstab to auto-mount them at boot, but if they drives are >>> not connected at boot time, I've found the the Pi doesn't boot >>> (it just seems to hang). > > If a thing may not be there, it is not recommended to auto-mount it on boot. > >>> mount -t ntfs PARTUUID=c6040663-9321-4d28-91f0-2f3eb35f72b7 /mnt/Ext3TB_Data1/ > > I thought you had to use NTFS-3g to write to NTFS.  Also, don't these things have labels?  It's much more readable and simpler to mount a thing with a label than a UUID if you can. > >>> How can I "conditionally" mount an external drive based on if >>> the drive is currently connected? > On 2020-09-09 14:13, James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss wrote: >> autofs or udev rules would be your best bet. > > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udev#Mounting_drives_in_rules explains how to do this sort of thing using udev and systemd (yeck!).  udev is not really meant for starting a long-running process, so there is a workaround. >