What is the difference between the root folder "/" and "/media/username/ubuntu-root"?

Andi Hafner

5/4/24, 9:22 AM

I recently did some housekeeping on the file system of my workstation (Ubuntu 22.04). I used NCurses Disk Usage in the terminal to get an overview of the largest folders and files.

Amongst others, I found /media/username/ubuntu-root/var/lib/yacy/INDEX wasting 14 Gigabyte of my storage space. The confusing fact about that is, that the folder /var/lib/yacy doesn't exist respectively doesn't appear under the file systems root, even not as root user, whereas it exists in the above mentioned /media sub folder and is definitive using a lot of disk space.

I will move yacys index files to another place, that's not the issue, but I don't understand the effect described above.

2 + 0

filesystem

mountpoint

Score:1

Ubuntu

Rinzwind

5/4/24, 9:32 AM

/ is you actual system
/media is for mounting removable disks (like usb sticks, external hard disks).

If you do not have an external disk mounted as "username" present you probably copied files over to "username/ubuntu-root/var/lib/yacy/INDEX" yourself. Ubuntu does NOT put files in /media/ itself.

+ 2

Andi Hafner

5/4/24, 10:59 AM

I ran yacy from the docker container [yacy/yacy_search_server](https://hub.docker.com/r/yacy/yacy_search_server). I'll have to occasionally analyze the differences between the two path locations further, because it's not restrained to the yacy subfolder only. Its undesirable to have two file system roots in any way. My hope was, that there were other users out there which remarked this issue / behavior already.

Rinzwind

5/4/24, 11:58 AM

" Its undesirable to have two file system roots in any way." that is only possible with two servers. All other locations are relative to root. I would myself always work from /opt (1 disk setup) or a personal mountpoint (with a 2+ disk setup where the mountpoint is that disk (so not a partition).

Score:0

Ubuntu

Andi Hafner

5/25/24, 5:07 PM

In the meantime, my confusion about "having two file system roots" has gone.

My workstation (A Desktop Tower built on my own in 2009 and still running ;-) consists of several drives with several operating systems installed on them.

Since then until about 2021 I ran my main OS (Ubuntu) on two partitions of a 1.5 TB Hard Disk Drive (one partition for the root [/] and one for the [/home] directory).

In the meantime I bought two additional Solid State Disks and did a new Ubuntu Install there with an md-raid / LVM setup. Until then, I'm working from this new Installation, and from here, the root partition mentioned above, is mounted as /home/[username]/ubuntu-root, while ubuntu-root is the name which I gave to that partition myself, once I created it many years ago.

So /home/[username]/ubuntu-root is the root filesystem of my old Installation, which hasn't any relation to my actual one, which I didn't understand at first sight.

So, finally, the mystery is solved ;-)

+ 0

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: What is the difference between the root folder "/" and "/media/username/ubuntu-root"?

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.