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Accepted
Mike Wills
Asked: 2012-05-03 21:05:28 +0800 CST

How do I add a new root folder to specific drive?

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I have /var on a separate drive and now I want to add /backup to that same drive. How would I do that?

When I installed Ubuntu, I put / on an 80 GB drive and had a 250 GB drive use /var. I want my backups to reside on the 250 GB drive since they can take up quite a bit of space.

filesystem hard-drive

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Since you specified you'd like them both to be on the same partition on that drive, I'll give you some pointers:

    1. Your existing /var mount probably mounts the entire partition, ie the root of that partition. You can therefore only do that once.

    2. You could, however, have both a /var and a /backup on that partition, ie have both of them one level down. So instead of the root of that partition being your /var, the root of your partition will contain a "var" and a "backup" directory.

      You would then need to mount that drive to one specific mount point, say /mnt/mydrive.

      Then, set up bind mounts from /var and /backup to directories within your /mnt/mydrive, eg to /mnt/mydrive/var and /mnt/mydrive/backup.

      The use of bind mounts allows you to have them in your /etc/fstab just like a normal mount, but it allows you to mount only a particular directory, not the whole partition.

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