This is another blog entry primarily aimed at reminding me of how to do something, that I’ll no doubt have forgotten by the time I need to do it again!
I currently store all of my ebooks on my server, a nice central location which is easy for me to access from anywhere at home. However, I was due to go away for a four month period trip and decided to take a copy of my ebook directory away with me on an external hard drive. My initial thought was to simply copy the directory and it’s contents from my server to my external hard drive, but all those small files sure do take a long time to copy…
Why not simply plug my external hard drive into my server? Well I should probably point out that my server is configured as a headless system and as such runs Fedora without a GUI and is administered via the Terminal in OS X. Naturally as I haven’t needed to use an external USB drive before I hadn’t configured my Fedora install to use them, and so we finally come to the point of this blog posting!
To find out the device name for your USB drive you can navigate to
/dev/disk/by-label
and then use
ls -la

As you can see my USB drive is called
ELEMENTS
and it’s device name is
sdc1
To create a mount point for the drive use
mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
and then to mount it use
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive
You can then use the drive like any other drive, for example
cd /mnt/usbdrive
Finally to unmount the drive, use
umount /mnt/usbdrive