Identify the New Drive
Make sure the drive is installed by using lsblk to check. In the example below, it’s sdb.
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 237G 0 part /
└─sda3 8:3 0 977M 0 part [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
Create Partition
sudo parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
sudo parted --align optimal /dev/sdb mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
If you type lsblk again, you’ll now see the partition.
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 237G 0 part /
└─sda3 8:3 0 977M 0 part [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 931.5G 0 part
Create a Filesystem on The Partition
sudo mkfs --type ext4 -L backup /dev/sdb1
All being well the filesystem will have been written to the disk without issue.
mke2fs 1.44.5 (15-Dec-2018)
Creating filesystem with 244190208 4k blocks and 61054976 inodes
Filesystem UUID: ebc7b754-fa8f-4387-a979-a55f72a180e0
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (262144 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
Let’s check everything is looking ok with sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,UUID,MOUNTPOINT
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 vfat 8D94-4DC4 /boot/efi
├─sda2 ext4 4f6f8b2f-46c7-434b-9c67-4933ef359370 /
└─sda3 swap db9aa753-c969-469c-8573-5c2de77f42fa [SWAP]
sdb
└─sdb1 ext4 backup ebc7b754-fa8f-4387-a979-a55f72a180e0
Mount the Filesystem
sudo mkdir --parents /mnt/backup
sudo mount --options defaults /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup
Finally to ensure the drive is mounted on startup, we’ll append the below to /etc/fstab.
UUID=<uuid_here> /mnt/backup ext4 defaults 0 2