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Seeing as the Snappy Ubuntu filesystem is so locked down I was wondering whether one can mount and access an external drive in Ubuntu Snappy?

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  • I'll admit upfront that I've never used snappy. However, you can still use sudo, right? If you've got root, anything is possible. May 12, 2016 at 12:04

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Of course! It works as you'd expect. However, it's only really useful for a local user or from unconfined snaps-- as you noticed, snaps are pretty locked down and their default confinement won't let them reach out to the external drive.

There are ways around this though-- one is to install the snaps with devmode to unconfine them:

$ sudo snap install --devmode <snap>

Another way is to actually place the writable partition on the external hard drive, which would allow all snaps to place their data there without them knowing any different. Of course, that means the hard drive needs to be present at all times. This is the solution that was used for the ownCloud Pi device in order to make use of the large external hard drive and save the life of the SD card in the raspberry pi.

The final solution is a new interface to allow specific snaps access to the external hard drive. This isn't complete yet, but is a known limitation.

Update as of snapd v2.15: This interface is now supported, called removable-media. It's documented here.

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