I have a NTFS drive for Storage, which is shared between Win 11.

I want to change the location of (or replace) ~/Downloads, ~/Music, etc…,.

Note that the link to made is between NTFS and EXT4.

I found two ways while searching.

   1.Creating **Symlinks** in `~` with target pointed to folders in NTFS drive.

   2. **Mounting** the NTFS folders **directly** to`~/Downloads`, `~/Music`, etc..,.

Which one should I do? Which one is more beneficial?

Also how to mount folders to other folders (option 2) ? (I would really appreciate a GUI way)

I know this is not that important of a thing to post on Main Linux Community, but I already asked 2 linux4noobs community, and they are empty.

This is a continuation to my previous discussion, where most of the people said,

  1. It doesn’t matter where I mount.

  2. Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)

  • Samueru@lemmy.ml
    1·
    4 months ago

    Folders? you mean directories 👀

    Mount the disk (if you ask me at /media/nameofdir) and configure ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs (99% of that time that would be the .config dir in your home lol) and define each XDG_***_DIR= to the respective directory in the path of the mounted disk, no need to make symlinks, though you might need to because there is likely many apps that don’t follow xdg specs.

    I would really appreciate a GUI way

    I know gnome-disks has a GUI way to change the mount options, I don’t know how good it is though.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    Hey man, I think this is a perfectly valid question to ask here. Also I was one of the people who replied on the other thread as well.

    So, let’s start with the why. I imagine you want to have ~/Downloads be inside your large disk so files get automatically downloaded there, I imagine ~/Documents is to have access to the same documenta on both OSs. If that’s not the why or there’s something else let me know as I’ll be basing my answer on this assumption.

    Last time we told you about how you can mount things wherever you want to, I imagine by now you have an entry on your fstab that automatically mounts that NTFS drive somewhere. I’ll call that somewhere /ntfs just to give it a name/path, but any other path should be the same.

    If you wanted your ENTIRE NTFS partition to be on ~/Downloads it’s as easy as changing that fstab entry from /ntfs to /home/gpstarman/Downloads (or whatever your username is). But I imagine you want something more complex, you want to have /ntfs/downloads and ~/Downloads to be the same directory.

    Like you found out there are two ways to do this, the first and most easy one is to create a link. To do so graphically just open whatever file explorer you use right click and drag from one path to the other and you should have an option link here or something similar. Note that you might need to delete or rename your existing ~/Downloads folder to have the link be named that. If you wanted to do it by command line it’s ln -s <target> <link name>, so in your hypothetical case ln -s /ntfs/downloads ~/Downloads

    This should work for 99% of cases and honestly I don’t think you should care too much about mounting. I’ll reply to this comment with the steps for mounting and explaining why it’s different just to be on the safe side.