How to mount by UUID without using /etc/fstab

By default, if your fstab entry is:

UUID=913aedd1...    /media/Schijf-2   ext4    rw,relatime   0    2

your partition will not be shown as Schijf-2 in your sidebar, unless it is labelled Schijf-2. You have two options:

• Leave the fstab entry as is and label your partition (e.g. if sda2 is your partition):

  e2label /dev/sda2 Schijf-2

• Leave the partition as is and add x-gvfs-name=Schijf-2¹ to your mount options in fstab:

  UUID=913aedd1 /media/Schijf-2 ext4 rw,relatime,x-gvfs-name=Schijf-2 0 2

₁ this works even if the partition has a different label and you want it to be shown as Schijf-2

I noticed that the devpath attribute is constant for my USB ports. You could add a new udev rule and create specific symlinks based on the ports the devices are plugged in then. Just add a new file into your /etc/udev/rules.d directory, that looks like this:

#new symlink for my front USB port:
KERNELS=="2-1.8", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{devpath}=="1.8", SYMLINK+="usb_port1"

and make sure it's name ends in .rules, e.g. port1.rules. From now on you can make the fstab entry using /dev/usb_port1 as any device plugged into that specific port will be listed under said symlink in /dev/ . Same for the SD card and you should be settled.

What is happening is that we check for unique properties of the specific port ( the == parts), and once these match add (+=) a new symlink to /dev/.

The information on attributes you want to match canbe retrieved via udevadm info -a /dev/sdb1 (for a device sdb1). Make sure you take attributes from only one parent device block, and that should be the one that have unique devpath and KERNELS entries - try with a few USB ports if available to see which ones change.

PS: udev will also allow to run a script when plugging in a device - might come in handy for your backup needs. However I do not know if booting your system will count as plugging in, so you'll have to check the behaviour.