On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Matt Graham
<danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:
From: Michael Havens
>> 3. Make an entry for the partition you made in your /etc/fstab :
>> LABEL=MY_BACKUPS /mnt/backup ext3 noauto,users,noatime 0 0
> In step 3 the "LABEL=..." entry in fstab makes it so that whatever has
> the label MY_BACKUPS will be seen as the proper device regardless of
> whether it is sdc, sdc1, sdd, etc....?
If you have a LABEL= entry in your fstab, then when you mount the mountpoint
for that entry, ("mount /mnt/backup" here), mount will query each block device
in the system and ask it "Is your label MY_BACKUPS?" If it gets a "yes"
answer, it will mount that block device on that mountpoint. mount knows where
the filesystem labels live on all commonly used filesystems (ext234, reiserfs,
xfs, jfs, FAT32, FAT16, NTFS, HFS+, and there are probably others I'm
forgetting), and it can do this check pretty quickly under normal
circumstances.
If you have 2 block devices on the same system with the same filesystem label,
and then you try to mount by label, stupid things will probably happen. So
don't do that.