System and Storage partitions on different drives

LastStarDust · October 6, 2017 at 10:27 AM

Hello.

First of all, I would like to thank all the developers for providing us (free of charge) with such a wonderful piece of software.

I am marveled everyday more by the thousands of features of LibreELEC.

There is only one thing that I couldn't manage to "custumize" by myself, yet.

The fact is that I have installed LibreELEC along side Ubuntu 16.04 on a 32GB SSD.

I have another 1TB HDD where I keep all the Music, Videos, etc. All the data.

I have attached a screenshot of GPARTED to depict the configuration.

During installation, LibreELEC created two partitions on the 32GB SSD, one of 512MB labelled "System" and another one of about 7GB labelled "Storage".

I don't use (in any way that I am aware of) the "Storage" partition. It only takes space and is full of directory that I don't use and that keep showing up in Samba shares, the file manager in LibreELEC, library folder lists, etc...

My questions are:

what happens if I remove that partition?
How can I tell LibreELEC that my storage partition is not that one but the one on the 1TB disk?
How can I customize my default folders (for Music, Pictures, Movies, etc) in LibreELEC?

I am not a complete noob (I would know how to do it in Ubuntu for istance). But I don't want to tamper with LibreELEC and loose all my library so I though that maybe I should ask here first.

Thank you

Giorgio

trogggy · October 6, 2017 at 10:48 AM

Your 'storage' partition on the ssd is where all your libreelec / kodi settings / addons / userdata are kept. You're using it - and if it were me I'd certainly want to keep that on the ssd rather than moving it to a slower mechanical drive.

If share locations aren't where you want you can change that in samba.conf (in storage/.conf). IIRC there's a video on the wiki.

LastStarDust · October 14, 2017 at 11:32 AM

Ok. I understand. Thank you for the information. I will take a look at the samba.conf (I have always had problems setting up samba, so tampering with that file always brings me back bad memories: that is why I tend not to open it without a valid reason) ... anyway... is there a way to tell LibreELEC to keep in the storage partition only the system files and that I keep the media files elsewhere? Let's take the folder "Picture" as an example. If I remove it LibreELEC creates it over again.

trogggy · October 14, 2017 at 11:52 AM

I've no idea if it's (easily) possible to stop those being created. I've no idea why you'd want to, either, as they have zero impact on kodi unless you point to them. They're just empty folders - I don't use them, I don't see them in kodi, I don't see any benefit in removing them. Of course there's always the possibility that I'm missing something...?

Edit: I do remove the ones I don't use from samba.conf, so the only time I see them is if I'm looking at the contents of 'storage'.

**chewitt** · October 14, 2017 at 5:53 PM Official Post

Delete the default 'sources' from Kodi configuration and just ignore the unused folders in /storage. It is not possible to prevent their re-creation on boot without making a custom image with changes, which is not worth the effort.

**Iridium** · October 14, 2017 at 6:15 PM Official Post

Would it not be possible just to put a soft link in? So /storage points to /<PATH>/1TBDisk/storage.

Something like, on the LE /storage partition.

Code

 ln -s /<PATH>/1TBDisk/storage /storage

**chewitt** · October 14, 2017 at 6:19 PM Official Post

You cannot control kernel time sequencing of mounts so symlinking things to /storage may (or may not) work and even if they happen to work now things may break randomly in the future. Just refrain from OCD and ignore /storage/movies etc. they are harmless!

LastStarDust · October 15, 2017 at 6:29 AM

Quote from trogggy

I've no idea if it's (easily) possible to stop those being created. I've no idea why you'd want to, either, as they have zero impact on kodi unless you point to them. They're just empty folders - I don't use them, I don't see them in kodi, I don't see any benefit in removing them. Of course there's always the possibility that I'm missing something...?

Edit: I do remove the ones I don't use from samba.conf, so the only time I see them is if I'm looking at the contents of 'storage'.

You are right. In daily use, those folders are harmless and you don't see them. But every time you have to access the storage file system (to rename a file, to move a file, etc) there are many folders that clutter the view. If I can live with that? Sure I can, no big deal. But if there were a simple way to solve this issue, I would do that ... that is why I am asking.

Quote from chewitt

Delete the default 'sources' from Kodi configuration and just ignore the unused folders in /storage. It is not possible to prevent their re-creation on boot without making a custom image with changes, which is not worth the effort.

Thank you very much for the information. I will try that.

Quote from chewitt

You cannot control kernel time sequencing of mounts so symlinking things to /storage may (or may not) work and even if they happen to work now things may break randomly in the future. Just refrain from OCD and ignore /storage/movies etc. they are harmless!

Ok I will refrain from OCD. That seems a good piece of advice.