Questions[storage](ubuntu)

I recently upgraded Ubuntu from 17.10 to 18.04 LTS and used my usb key as a backup for my files. Now that I am on Ubuntu 18.04, I have a problem with duplicity. In fact, when I run the restore process, the restore windows says "STORAGE LOCATION NOT AVAILABLE, Waiting for Google to be configured in your backup settings..." and then nothing happens. Can you help me please? Thank you very much

My computer has an SD card slot. When I put a working SD card into the slot, nothing happens. When I put a CD or DVD in, or plug in a USB drive, the medium is mounted and available. Is there something special I need to do for SD cards?

Hardware specifics

I am running 11.10 on a Dell XPS L502X. The card slot is marked "SDXC/MMC - MS/Pro" (which Wikipedia tells me are various SD card types).

I was lucky enough to be given a 40 GB SSD as a Christmas gift; and, given the inherent speed of these drives, decided it would be best used as the / partition; but then it occurred to me that this might not be enough space.

The plan I have in mind is:

40GB SSD - /

1TB HDD - /home

I'm not quite sure about where to put swap, but I'm toying with the idea of keeping that in RAM (if it's feasible), or on the HDD (if RAM isn't feasible).

I guess my question is three-fold:

1. Is a 40GB SSD practical for use as /?
2. If it's not practical, is Ubuntu (it'll be 10.10) able to use the extra space on the HDD?
3. ...as an after-thought: is it possible to separate / out at all? So that /etc/ and /var (for example) are on different drives? (Since /var/www/ is, to me, more closely related to the contents of /home than anything else).

is there the gdrive in ubuntu? like windows have. Or similar

Under Ubuntu 10.04 one of the problems which appeared is that USB devices would no longer automatically mount when plugged in. Normally I would get a pop up message asking what application I wanted to open the newly plugged in device with, however now that doesn't happen.

This happens regardless of the way the device is formatted (NTFS or FAT32) and all other USB devices (printer, keyboard and mouse) work perfectly.

My current solution is the mount them manually using sudo mount dev/... /medai/... however to be honest I'm just getting tired of having to do this.

I'm happy to post any extra information you are likely to need. I know there will be lots of places I could look to find out what's going wrong but I have no idea where to start really.