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Overview of Fstab
What Is Fstab?
Fstab is your operating system’s file system table. In the old days, it was the primary way that the system mounted files automatically. Nowadays, you can plug in a USB drive of any kind and it’ll just pop up in Nautilus as it does in Windows and Mac OS, but once upon a time, you had to manually mount those disks to a specific folder using the “mount” command. This held true for DVDs, CDs, and even floppies.
Back then, your only alternative was the tell the computer that anytime a specific device was plugged in, it should be automatically mounted in a specific place. This is where fstab came in, and it was awesome. Suppose you swapped hard disks on your IDE or SCSI controller. The computer could load the file systems in a different order, potentially messing things up. Fstab is configured to look for specific file systems and mount them automatically in the desired way each and every time, preventing a myriad of disasters from occurring.
The /etc/fstab file is a system configuration file that contains all available disks, disk partitions, and their options. Each file system is described on a separate line. Each line contains six fields separated by one or more spaces or tabs. If you add a new hard disk or have to repartition the existing one, you’ll probably need to modify this file.
