I have 2 directories which both have stuff in them:

  • /home/user/folderApple

  • /mnt/drive/folderBanana

I want to mount folderBanana onto folderApple like this:

sudo mount --bind "/mnt/drive/folderBanana" "/home/user/folderApple"

But I still want to be able to access the contents of folderApple while this is activated. From what I am reading, binding the original directory to a new location should make it available, like this:

mkdir "/home/user/folderApple-original"
sudo mount --bind  "/home/user/folderApple" "/home/user/folderApple-original"

But this just binds /mnt/drive/folderBanana to /home/user/folderApple-original as well. I tried reversing the order and result is the same.

How do I tell mount to look for the underlying directory?

I am happy to use symlinks or something else if it’ll reliably get the job done, I am not wedded to this mechanism.

(The purpose of all this is that when an external drive is connected, I can have the storage conveniently available, but when it is not connected, the system will fallback to internal storage. But then I will want to move files between the fallback and external locations when both are available. So I need to see both locations at once.)

  • Badabinski@kbin.earth
    2·
    2 days ago

    Sounds like you may want to use a union filesystem like overlayfs. I’m not sure if the specific behavior of overlayfs will work for you, but it’s worth investigating.

    Thank you for putting your use-case in your post, since otherwise I think this might be an XY problem.

    EDIT: There’s also mergefs and unionfs. I don’t know what the features and drawbacks are for these three union filesystems. mergefs seems like it might be the most configurable, but it’s also FUSE. unionfs and overlayfs are both in-kernel, so they’ll perform better (which may not matter for your use-case). overlayfs is the one I’m most familiar with of those two, since it’s used by most container runtimes.