Mounting external drive on Linux

Give permissions to specific user for writing into an external drive on Linux

Assumptions

1. These are steps I have tried when installing Nextcloud on my raspberry pi with external drives attached to it.

2. The uid and gid for www-data is 33. You will need to check it before you go ahead with the steps below.

Steps

1. Install exfat-fuse and exfat-utils

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfatprogs -y

2. Check existing mounts

   df -h #this will list all the mount points
   mount | grep /dev/sdX1

3. Unmount the mounted drive

   sudo umount /dev/sdX1

4. Attempt mounting by adding the uid and gid of the user or program you need to add the permission for

   sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdX1 /mnt/external-storage -o uid=33,gid=33,fmask=0022,dmask=0002

5. If there is any error like below

   fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy

6. Check if there was an auto-mount in the media folder.

   sudo lsof | grep /mnt/external-storage
   sudo kill -9 <PID>

7. Attempt mounting

   sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdX1 /mnt/external-storage -o uid=33,gid=33,fmask=0022,dmask=0002

8. Test write permissions

   sudo -u www-data touch /mnt/external-storage/testfile

Hope this helps. I was literally struggling to do this for a few days.