Arch Linux

zenlord

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-05-24

Posts: 1,221

Website

usb disk is unmounted automatically

Hi,

I have attached a 2TB USB disk and set up rsync to make a 'backup' (I know, it is not a backup, merely a copy) to this backup-disk.

But: without any mention in the logs, the disk gets unmounted. I have rebooted the server yesterday evening at 23:00 and I made sure that disk was mounted. This morning at 9:00, the drive is not mounted anymore... Of course this can cause problems, because rsync is scheduled to run every day, and if I make a copy to a directory on the same disk, I'll be out of space very soon.

I have also noticed that when the drive has not been used for a while, that it takes some time for tab completion in bash to work when working on that drive - but I guess that is caused by te disk spinning down in between uses...

Is there something I'm overlooking in my setup or should I script away (in udev I suppose) and check if the drive is mounted before running the rsync?

Drive details: Samsung Story Station 2TB USB / 1 partition (ext4) / mounted by UUID in fstab:
UUID=e3434573-ad6f-4c44-8168-391292ba5ec5 /media/backup ext4 defaults 0 0

The server is a brand spanking new install with up-to-date archlinux x86_64.

Thx!

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: usb disk is unmounted automatically

I've had this problem, but with 2.5" disks... It looks like I solved it by plugging only one disk per pair of USB outputs. (My mobo is a Gigabyte H55N-USB3.)

My backup script simply checks the existence of the target backup directory.

zenlord

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-05-24

Posts: 1,221

Website

Re: usb disk is unmounted automatically

I made a bashscript to handle the syncing - this is probably the best way to do it:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 10#p899610

rwd

Member

Registered: 2009-02-08

Posts: 664

Re: usb disk is unmounted automatically

I've  never had problems with usb disks unmounting spontaneously, so I'm just guessing,  but could it be usb powermanagement?    laptop-mode-tools  does all kinds of powermanagement tuning, so if you have this installed disable it to see if that is the case. The spindown is caused harddisk powermanagement that you can set with  hdparm, but this shouldn't cause unmounting.  To determine if the problem is specific to  that particular usb harddisk, all usb harddisks, or all usb storage see if it happens with a usb pendrive as well, or a different usb harddisk.

Last edited by rwd (2011-03-05 17:32:29)