I use USB hard drives for backing up one of my machines, swapping them regularly but leaving everything else up to the backup script that runs daily. This means that I want to mount them at the same place every time, regardless of which drive I plug in or what device it is registered as. This isn’t very difficult because fstab can use UUIDs or labels to identify disks:
UUID=6B70-A309 /media/sw_backup vfat user 0 0 LABEL="<strong style="color:#060">SW_BACKUP</strong>" /media/sw_backup vfat user 0 0
(Note: these backup drives are formatted with FAT filesystems so that I can if need be restore on any system if required.)
To avoid having to manually add the disk every time I put a new one into rotation, I go with the label method.
To use this, each disk must be given the same label (and then not plugged in at the same time!). To set the label, first find the device:
sw@swbackup:~/backups$ sudo blkid /dev/sda3: UUID="f31d1291-9d6f-441d-9f8d-fa34e9f569d5" TYPE="swap" /dev/sda4: UUID="8a0b99a2-8a2e-4eae-7666-d607fbc44de5" TYPE="ext4" <strong style="color:#060">/dev/sdb1</strong>: LABEL="NONAME" UUID="4A39-C8E7" TYPE="vfat"
Then sudoedit /etc/mtools.conf to add the following, where the device name is the same as above:
mtools_skip_check=1 drive s: file="<strong style="color:#060">/dev/sdb1</strong>"
Now mtools can change the label:
sw@swbackup:~/backups$ sudo mlabel -s s: Volume label is NONAME sw@swbackup:~/backups$ sudo mlabel s:<strong style="color:#060">SW_BACKUP</strong> sw@swbackup:~/backups$ sudo mlabel -s s: Volume label is SW_BACKUP