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3

It seems to me that having both /mnt and /media is a little redundant. Is there any tangible difference between the two that I'm not aware of?

Is there a standard that most people follow for where to mount things, e.g. use one for certain types of devices, or is this completely subjective?

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3 Answers

up vote 24 down vote accepted

The new standard is that /media is where the system mounts removable media, and /mnt is for you to mount things manually.

See the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS) for details.

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By the way, that website link is unclear about the purpose of /mnt in this context. – djangofan Dec 1 '11 at 16:01
It says /mnt is for the system administrator. This implies that /mnt should not be used by the system itself. So if your computer automatically mounts a CD or DVD, it should mount it in /media, not /mnt. – Mikel Jan 26 '12 at 1:23
I certainly agree with that (with you), but the article didn't explicitly say that. – djangofan Jan 30 '12 at 17:32
if /mnt is for temporary and /media is for removable where should permanent non-removable devices/partitions be mounted. i.e. an internal HDD which is formatted as NTFS but needs to be automounted at startup? – Caltor Oct 17 '12 at 13:48
Without re-reading the spec, I'm pretty sure that since nothing else should use that drive unless explicitly pointed there, you can mount that drive's partitions anywhere you like, e.g. /data or /a. – Mikel Oct 18 '12 at 13:05
up vote 4 down vote

/mnt was already accepted as a place to manually and temporarily mount external media. The /media directory was created as a place under which multiple media, external or otherwise, could be automatically mounted.

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I can't help but notice that your answer and kiswa's answer are exact opposite. So, who is right?? The website Mikel provided isn't clear enough. – djangofan Dec 1 '11 at 16:02
@djangofan, mine ;) – psusi Dec 2 '11 at 2:29
up vote 3 down vote

As I understand it, /media is for mounting things like optical drives and other temporary media, where /mnt is usually for permanently attached storage (generally internal disks).

Of course, you can also mount a device anywhere you want... the /mnt and /media directories are more conventional though.

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