How to mount a USB drive in Turnkey Linux

I like Turnkey Linux, which is a collection of pre-built server appliances based on Ubuntu. When you need a server fifteen minutes from now, it’s about the only way you can make it happen.

But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t mount USB drives automatically. That’s fine; these servers are designed to have the minimum necessary for their stated purpose in life and nothing more. Here’s how I mount a USB drive to use for making backups.

1. Plug in the USB drive

2. Log in as root or become root with su

3. Issue the following command:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt

4. Verify it mounted with the following comand:


You should see output that looks like this:
/dev/sdb1 on /mnt type vfat (rw)

5. Issue your backup command. I typically do something like this:

tar cvzf /mnt/backup/13nov2011.tar.gz /var/www /var/lib/mysql

It’s easy, but not necessarily obvious. Such things are common in the world of Linux and Unix.

To unmount the drive, issue the following command:

umount /mnt

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