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.