2010-01-09, 12:00
When your movie collection grows, so do your storage needs. I decided to build a solution where I could add as many harddrives as I'd like, without having to add them separately to the library, or having to search all my movie directories for files.
The trick is to use aufs. aufs is the successor of unionfs and lets you mount multiple partitions under the same location. In this example I have two partitions containing movies, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1. I mount these in fstab, using the regular commands:
I have 2 directories containing my movies, /mnt/movies1/Films and /mnt/movies2/Films. I want to see all my movies under /mnt/films, instead of having to search /mnt/movies1 and /mnt/movies2. To do this I add the following line to /etc/fstab:
This mounts both /mnt/movies1/Films and /mnt/movies2/Films to /mnt/films. I use the option "=ro" to mount them both readonly. That way it's also harder to screw something up. I can still write to these filesystems, using /mnt/movies1 or /mnt/movies2. When I add /mnt/films to xbmc it's seen as a readonly filesystem, which is what I prefer, but you might want to change that.
You can add as many partitions as you want; all you need to do is add them to fstab and you can have a virtual partition with many terabytes of movies.
The trick is to use aufs. aufs is the successor of unionfs and lets you mount multiple partitions under the same location. In this example I have two partitions containing movies, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1. I mount these in fstab, using the regular commands:
Code:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/movies2 ext4 defaults,user,noatime 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/movies1 ext3 defaults,user,noatime 0 0
I have 2 directories containing my movies, /mnt/movies1/Films and /mnt/movies2/Films. I want to see all my movies under /mnt/films, instead of having to search /mnt/movies1 and /mnt/movies2. To do this I add the following line to /etc/fstab:
Code:
none /mnt/films aufs user,br=/mnt/movies1/Films=ro:/mnt/movies2/Films=ro 0 0
This mounts both /mnt/movies1/Films and /mnt/movies2/Films to /mnt/films. I use the option "=ro" to mount them both readonly. That way it's also harder to screw something up. I can still write to these filesystems, using /mnt/movies1 or /mnt/movies2. When I add /mnt/films to xbmc it's seen as a readonly filesystem, which is what I prefer, but you might want to change that.
You can add as many partitions as you want; all you need to do is add them to fstab and you can have a virtual partition with many terabytes of movies.