mount eg /home to left sd

since im a beginner who wants to leran bout linux im trying and destroying a lot. i cant count any more how often i did recover and reconfigured my nb.
is there a way to use the left sd slot not for expanding the ssd but for mounting config dirs (afaik home&usr (are there more?)) on a sd card in the left slot?
maybe its even clever to mount some temp dirs there (speed/lifetime of ssd)?

thx in advance

 

I am not a linux expert, but I have messed with the One system a lot, enough to need a lot of recovery activity

To reduce recovery time I set up a base configuration, then cloned it (took a snapshot) with dd.
Whenever I want a known config', I just boot a usb stick and then restore my snapshot.

 

The left SD doesn't really expand the SSD. What actually happens is that Linpus makes use of aufs (a union filesystem) to combine the contents of the SD card in that slot with the contents of /home/user (the user's home directory) with both branches being writable, this gives the illusion of the SSD being increased.

It should be possible to stop this happening, but even after extensive examination of the startup scripts I haven't worked out where this mount is being called from though /etc/aufs.act appears to be the controlling script for it.

If you do stop this aufs mount, then it would be possible to use this left slot for regular mounts.

For temp dirs it is better to mount them to a ramdisk rather than a SD card and the main one /tmp already is by default, though you might want to mount /var/log to a ramdisk as well if you want to save SSD writes since IME log files on a desktop aren't often of use.

/usr isn't a config dir, perhaps you were thinking of /etc, though having /etc on SD card won't provide real benefit since you don't often change files there since they are mostly system-wide defaults.

A problem you might have with using the SD slot to mount part of the filesystem is that they don't always seem to stay mounted after coming back from suspend, I guess this doesn't cause much problem when using it as storage expansion since it can be auto remounted and merged with the SSD through aufs pretty much transparently, but a regular mount would have no such buffer.

 

i dont really care, how often they are changed... ido have my one exactly 1 week and i need to recover at least 2 times a day (yes, im new to linux and do a lot of expiriments). id just like to minimize the time intensive reconfiguration, so my idea was:
config on sd.. unplug sd, recover, change a mountpoint, insert, everything is finr

i did allready a gzipped image (dd) of a working config, but i didnt get it back so far (dd zipfile of=sda (?) do i need something else to decompress it?)
or is it just possible to copy the etc/ and backing it up to have my old config?

the next point is, that id like to have my own files on the sd (cause of my new hobby: recover ,p). the right one would do the job as well, but the disadvantage is, that the sd is not completeley in the one, which might be critical during transports ,p

 

Then I guess it depends on what files you are changing for your configuration, I guess mostly those would be in your home dir rather than /etc.

That depends on how created the image, assuming it is a gzip crompressed raw image then you could restore it with "zcat image.gz >/dev/sda"

That would probably be the best way to do it.

You can keep your own files on the SD and use it in the left slot if you want, it adds some directories to match the default set in your home dir and some dotfiles (the files which start with a "." and are considered hidden files on unix-like systems) for maintaining the union filesystem, but leaves what is already on there intact (I've only tested with a FAT32 formatted card, but I've no reason to think it would reformat the card if it had a different filesystem).

 

That would probably be the best way to do it.
the command i found was "dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /media/disk/hdimage.gz" will ur way to restore work? =)

You can keep your own files on the SD and use it in the left slot if you want, it adds some directories to match the default set in your home dir and some dotfiles (the files which start with a "." and are considered hidden files on unix-like systems) for maintaining the union filesystem, but leaves what is already on there intact (I've only tested with a FAT32 formatted card, but I've no reason to think it would reformat the card if it had a different filesystem).[/quote:2f7vtaj1]

i tried it, its been recognized, now just a way to mount it to the usr/home download/videos/music folder and im happy with this