Linux question

[slodave]

Hi!

I have been using Linux for about 10 years and have found almost all answers to my problems via the web or just plain messing around until it works. Now I am stuck. I need to be able to plug and unplug two USB hard drives. The catch is that they are used for backing up and need to be swapped out each day. I have done this before without problem, but twice now (two different computers) the drives get assigned /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. The backup program flips out cause it is expecting both drives to be /dev/sdb. How can I change the drive number? Someone mentioned using udev, but I can not figure out what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!!!

Dave

EDIT: autofs is coded to use /dev/sdb. I can't go in on a daily basis and change the config file for autofs.

[id10t]

grep the dmesg output to see what device it is assigned to, then mount it appropriately.

dmesg | grep -A 3 scsi[0-9]\ \:\ SCSI\ emulation\ for\ USB\ Mass\ Storage | tail -1 | cut -f 3 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d :

gives it to me on my home debian box... of course, you'd want toa adjust the grep for a different key or improve it to a regular expression to make sure you are getting the right thing to mount. Maybe.

So tell autofs to ignore it, and write a wrapper script to handle the mounting and just call the wrapper at the start of your backup script.

[slodave]

I am actually using a backup program - Yosemite Backup. No backup script. Not sure if I could tell YB to run a script before and after. I will look into that. Finding the scsi/usb drive is not an issue.

This has worked before. I had two identical WD usb drives and things worked well until we noticed that one had a very slow throughput. It was RMA'd and the one that came back has a different model number even though they look the same and have the same capacity.

Dave