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I have built a basic web server, and everything works fine. I have a external hard drive which I would like to add to my /var/www folder. How should I do this?

0xSheepdog
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user273274
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  • If any of the options below worked for you pleased accept it by clicking the checkmark so that others with the same problem will be able to find it. Failure to do so results in extra unnecessary work for an already overworked staff by resulting in duplicate questions like this one: http://askubuntu.com/questions/634635/how-to-use-external-hard-drive-for-server-storage – Elder Geek Jun 10 '15 at 12:47

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The most logical answer to your question: I would consider to create a mountpoint /var/ pointing that disc. That way your whole /var/ will be on that disc. That is not adding it to the current /var/www/ though. If the current disc has lots of content in /var/ your new disc if filled with that content already. You could do that following this answer.

The 2nd option would be to create a symlink in /var/ to point to the new disc. That way you add the new disc to the current content. But it might spell trouble in the future: not everything seems to understand or to correctly interpret symlinks. Plus you are spreading out your /var/ over 2 discs. So if 1 of the discs breaks the other becomes useless...

To offer a possible better option since you asked "how should I do this": Apache2 (assuming you use this) works with virtualhosts. That kills the need to store web content in /var/ and you can store it anywhere you want by including a documentroot in any of the virtualhosts. The default one will point to /var/www/ . So you can mount your disc with a name you like (ie. /user27374/) and put your website content into that directory (./var/www/ on that disc). You can keep the current /var/, copy it all over to the new disc (ie /user27374/var/www/), create a 2nd virtualhost that points to this webroot and test your setup while the current one stays active.

Any of these can be used but the last one I consider the easiest with the least maintenance. But feel free to consider any of the options (or if someone else posts a different one their method :) ).

Mind though that an external disc is not the quickest when loading data and you will need to have it mounted always if you want to use the webserver.

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Rinzwind
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