shamelessly stolen from nixCraft on mastodon
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Another advantage of having a NVMe SSD, hard to confuse /dev/nvme0n1p2 with /dev/sda1
It's even easier to prevent confusion if you use /dev/disk/by-id/ id's, it only took a few times of overwriting the wrong disk to figure that out.
I think that does the opposite for me lol
How can I figure out which direct device is associated with a specific id?
Not sure if it is equal on all distros but on every one I have used it's a readable string of muliple components. One of them is "usb" for a usb mass storage, so if it is the only one you have connected to your computer it is very obvious. For like sata disks it has the manufacturer and serial on it so you can match what drive it is you want to write to. Also, the name is pretty unique (on your sysytem at least, globally I don't know), so even if you swap hardware around, you cannot write to the wrong storage if you got the right name. Like "sdb" can be reassigned, but the id is an id.
They're symlinks, so you can just
ls -l /dev/disk/by-id, and you can see what is what.ˋblkidˋ or take a look around /dev, devices are symlinked to their various attributes.
When I accidentally decimated my external hard drive, it had NTFS cause there were a few windows machines I would plug it in. Then I reformatted the disk but then I thought to myself, should I have another partition for my Linux machine because that drive gets corrupted and then I need to plug to a Windows machine to repair it once in a while. Then I created an ext4 partition on the disk. Then a few days after I shrinked the NTFS partition and extended the ext4 to the whole disk. Now that disk only has one partition called sda2. Which is kinda weird but makes it easier to distinguish from others disks on the system.
I just make use of my paranoia, so I triple and quadruple check. Then get a coffee and quadruple check again. Never messed up once
Even if it's similar names I'd normally plug in USB, do
dmesg, then issue a command with latest device name.