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Mounting Folders VS Symlinks? (lemmy.today)

submitted 4 months ago by gpstarman@lemmy.today to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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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)

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[–] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

(Personal preference) I would symlink them as subdirectories, so not ~/Downloads but e.g. ~/Downloads/shared. This way you can unmount the NTFS drive at will, and still have a functional directory.

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the idea.

Which one is more beneficial?

(Personal preference)

So, No Difference?

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's been ages since I've mounted a working NTFS mount point but if I remember correctly, it's more finicky with I/O transactions than ext4.

As a result, I never mounted or symlinked NTFS on my home directory directly, and instead mounted it elsewhere and then saved files to that location directly.

If possible, I'd consider doing the opposite of what you're doing. Keep your home directory and then expose them using samba to your windows environment. Samba is more stable than mounting NTFS, again in my experience.

NTFS may have gotten an upgrade since I last used it (early 2010s).

But if I had to choose, I'd do symlinks since doing mount points can get messy at boot time. And you'll never run the risk of the mount not being there and then you accidentally saving something in the directory.

[–] gpstarman@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago

Thank you.