[kwlug-disc] Multiple disks to single mount point

[Rashkae]

Chris Irwin wrote:
> I'm currently using a 3.5" SATA hotswap bay for backups, swapping out a
> drive every week, and swapping a new one in. I'm considering changing
> the UUIDs on my backup filesystems to all be the same, thus I can have
> an entry in /etc/fstab that will work, rather than my current routine of
> manually checking dmesg and mounting/umounting devices directly. 
> 
> Can anybody think of a negative side of having duplicated UUIDs? You can
> assume I won't have multiple disks connected at a single time.
> 
> Or is there a better way to control mounting multiple drives to a common
> mount-point? I tried multiple UUID entries in fstab, but it only looks
> for the first if I tell it to mount /mnt/backup and fails with only the
> second drive connected.

I use file system Labels for this, (and my fstab uses LABEL= rather than 
UUID=)

In practice, I don't think there's much difference.  However, typing in 
your own LABEL is easier than a UUID, and unlike UUID's, there really 
isn't any expectation that LABEL's are always unique, (though you will 
still have unpredictable results if you boot a system that tries to 
mount a filesystem with duplicate labels)