Creating the Directories

To create the toplevel directories run:

sudo mkdir /myBackup /myDatabases

You may also want to make yourself the owner of these folders:

sudo chown -R ubuntuka:ubuntuka /myBackup /myDatabases

(replace ubuntuka with your user name)

Choosing a Partition

You can list the available partitions using this command:

sudo fdisk -l

Each partition will have a location like /dev/sda1. Choose the partition you want to automount and remember this location.

Finding Partition Information

You now need to find the UUID (unique identification) of the partition and the filesystem type. To do this, use the udisks command. I can't remember if this is installed by default but if it isn't, run:

sudo apt-get install udisks

to install it.

Finding the UUID

To get the UUID (of /dev/sda1 in this example), run:

udisks --show-info /dev/sda1 | grep uuid

You will get output like:

    by-id:                     /dev/disk/by-uuid/228EF188-BDEE-11E0-8F41-F5A84824019B

 uuid:                        228EF188-BDEE-11E0-8F41-F5A84824019B

   uuid:                      

where 228EF188-BDEE-11E0-8F41-F5A84824019B is the UUID.

Finding the Filesystem Type

To get the filesystem type of the partition (/dev/sda1 in the example), run:

udisks --show-info /dev/sda1 | grep type

You will get output like:

  type:                        ext4

    type:                      0x83

where ext4 is the filesystem type.

Backing up fstab

To get partitions to mount on boot, you need to edit /etc/fstab. This file is pretty vital for the use of your computer so you should back up the current version whenever you make a change.

To do this, you can run:

sudo cp -v "/etc/fstab" "/etc/fstab-$(date +%s)"

You will get output like this:

`/etc/fstab' -> `/etc/fstab-1312389815'

For this example, to restore the old settings run:

sudo cp -v "/etc/fstab" "/etc/fstab-$(date +%s)" && sudo cp -v /etc/fstab-1312389815 /etc/fstab 

Editing fstab

To edit /etc/fstab, run:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

To add an automounted partition, add a line like this:

UUID=228EF188-BDEE-11E0-8F41-F5A84824019B /myBackup ext4 defaults 0 0

and press Ctrl+O to save. This example would automount /dev/sda1 to /myBackup. You will need to replace 228EF188-BDEE-11E0-8F41-F5A84824019B, /myBackup and ext4 with the respective UUID, mountpoint and filesystem type of the partition.

Testing

You don't need to reboot to test this out. Instead, run:

sudo mount -a

You should then test to see if the contents of the directories are as you expected.