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9.2.3. Backups on/from jazz drives, USB devices and other removables
These devices are usually mounted into the file system. After the mount procedure, they are accessed as normal directories, so you can use the standard commands for manipulating files.
In the example below, images are copied from a USB camera to the hard disk:
robin:~> mount /mnt/camera
robin:~> mount | grep camera
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/camera type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev)
robin:~> mount /mnt/camera
robin:~> mount | grep camera
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/camera type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev)
If the camera is the only USB storage device that you ever connect to your system, this is safe. But keep in mind that USB devices are assigned entries in /dev as they are connected to the system. Thus, if you first connect a USB stick to your system, it will be on the /dev/sda entry, and if you connect your camera after that, it will be assigned to /dev/sdb - provided that you do not have any SCSI disks, which are also on
/dev/sd*. On newer systems, since kernel 2.6, a hotplug system called HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) ensures that users don't have to deal with this burden. If you want to check where your device is, type dmesg after inserting it.
You can now copy the files:
robin:~> cp -R /mnt/camera/* images/
robin:~> umount /mnt/camera
robin:~> cp -R /mnt/camera/* images/
robin:~> umount /mnt/camera
Likewise, a jazz drive may be mounted on /mnt/jazz.