USB mountpoints jumping around

[Sorin Srbu]

Hello all!

I need some input and thoughts on an issue I have with USB mountpoints
jumping around on a laptop.
The OS is Kubuntu 22.04, and I'm guessing in this case Ubuntu and Kubuntu
behaves the same.

Situation:
I have a 5 TB usb-disk connected to my laptop that I use to back up the
entire volume in order to be able to do a bare metal-restore, should the
need arise. I use Veeam backup agent for linux for this.

Since the usb mountpoint seems to jump around after reboots or even
depending who's logged on, I opted to mount a /backup-folder to a partition-
UUID instead, using a line in /etc/fstab. 
This works great and I have no failed backups, which I had before when I let
the drive automount!

The problem is that sometimes I need to shutdown and remove my laptop from
its dock and use it elsewhere, ie I'm disconnecting the 5 TB-usb disk.

Upon the next reboot (w/o the 5 TB-usb disk) the OS borks totally, showing
me a maintenance needed-screen and options to run an fsck; presumably
because the 5 TB disk is missing.

After some googling I found a reference to the noauto flag one could use in
fstab, for  storage you do not want to mount at boot.
So, I replaced the normal defaults flag with noauto and rebooted the laptop
without the 5 TB drive, and I still get the fsck thing mentioned above.


Speculations:
My understanding was that the noauto flag would tell the OS to ignore
mounting the missing drive and just boot normally, but it seems it doesn't.
Am not sure if I misunderstand the noauto function or why the OS's still
trying to mount the missing drive.

If I just comment out the mount line in fstab for the 5 TB drive, the OS
boots just fine, but it kinda' defeats the whole point with having it in the
fstab at all.


So, is there any other way to have this usb-drive mount only when needed, ie
when the veeam backup agent runs?
Maybe I need to go down some other path? Which one in that case?

As mentioned, earlier thoughts and feedback on this is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!


-- 
Sorin Srbu, Serverdrift
Tele: 08-524 84166
Karolinska Institutet Universitetsbibliotek
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