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Mounting Folders VS Symlinks? (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 months ago by gpstarman@lemmy.today to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I have a NTFS drive for Storage, which is shared between Win 11.

I want to change the location of (or replace) ~/Downloads, ~/Music, etc..,.

Note that the link to made is between NTFS and EXT4.

I found two ways while searching.

   1.Creating **Symlinks** in `~` with target pointed to folders in NTFS drive.

   2. **Mounting** the NTFS folders **directly** to`~/Downloads`, `~/Music`, etc..,.

Which one should I do? Which one is more beneficial?

Also how to mount folders to other folders (option 2) ? (I would really appreciate a GUI way)

I know this is not that important of a thing to post on Main Linux Community, but I already asked 2 linux4noobs community, and they are empty.

This is a continuation to my previous discussion, where most of the people said,

  1. It doesn't matter where I mount.

  2. Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)

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[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I don’t think this is a bad question at all, personally I would prefer to mount the drive once and symlink folders for a couple reasons:

  1. It’s easier to automate
  2. it’s theoretically faster (to initialize) as symlinks are effectively free
  3. I personally like symlink syntax more than mount syntax :P

One possible con to symlinks is that certain (linux native) software can misbehave when it has to interact with them, but this is a fairly uncommon issue. Stuff ran through wine or proton should support them just fine, as they are abstracted away.

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks man.

It’s easier to automate

I'm failing to see how and why one would do this? ( just curious )

I personally like symlink syntax more than mount syntax :P

same man. It's just more simple.

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

bind mounts don't usually have the problems that symlinks do. The only time I've had issues involve container systems like docker or flatpak.

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Lots of internet people says that one can't create mount points across different filesystems.

problems that symlinks do

Can you explain more please?

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lots of internet people says that one can't create mount points across different filesystems.

Citation needed. Bind mounts work just fine wherever you put them, again: you need to mount your source filesystem somewhere then you can bind mount paths from that mounted filesystem anywhere in the running VFS tree. You should Google linux bind mounts, they're quite simple.

problems that symlinks do

Can you explain more please?

Some software has problems following symlinks properly and fails to work unless given the symlink source path instead

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

Citation needed

My bad. I got it confused with hardlinks.

Thank you.