I have a five 4TB usb drives. I want to setup a mount point, /mnt/backups so that when I plug in any of those drives, they get automatically mounted to /mnt/backups.
The problem is that when the drive path changes all the time for the drives even though I put them in the same usb slot. I've seen /dev/sde1 through /dev/sdh1...
OS is Ubuntu.
Have a look at /dev/disk. There are some other ways to access the devices. by-path may suit your needs, dependent from the usb controllers in your drives. If this does not work you might just label (e2label(8)) your partitions and use by-label.
by-path then I can plug a different drive into the same usb slot and it will work.
by-path folder are symlinks to e.g. /dev/sde1. So you can just mount /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:01:00.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 /mnt/backups. Some for by-path
by-label way.
My understanding is that you can use udev to define the disk locations as static as well.
I don't know about your Ubuntu version, but 12.04 LTS will automatically mount USB devices and put them in /media/disklabel, where 'disklabel' is the actual name of the disk according to the partition metadata. This makes the path of the disk consistent across each mounting.
