Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Fedora 15 makes /media a tmpfs

The /media directory is defined in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard as containing subdirectories "which are used as mount points for removeable media such as floppy disks, cdroms and zip disks".

Some people, myself included, have been known to use this location to mount more semi-permanent media such as additional hard drives or even network shares below this location. I fully recognise that this was always folly of me, but hey - for a long time it worked.

As of Fedora 15 the /media directory has become a tmpfs by default. This means that among other things it is wiped on reboot. Any devices still plugged in will of course be detected when the system starts and their mounts will re-appear in the directory.

What this means for those of us who have been abusing this area of the filesystem is that our mounts have 'disappeared' since the first reboot after the upgrade.

Simply issuing umount /media as root is enough to temporarily return your mounts to their previous state so that you can move the data to a less controversial location.

1 comment:

  1. I discovered this myself last night, although I didn't know the reason for it. Glad to see that there is some method to that madness. Time to think of a new parent directory for my Music and Videos directories ...

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