Using External Storage - alastairtech/rivendell GitHub Wiki

Most of the time your MicroSD card won't provide anywhere near enough storage for your database of audio. We also don't recommend storing audio on the MicroSD card if you can help it. MicroSD has a finite life when it comes to read and writes, you may only get a couple of years usage or less from a standard MicroSD card. This guide will show you how to set up an external drive as your audio storage on Rivendell.

Warning! This guide assumes you want to use the entire external drive for audio storage

You may already be aware that Rivendell stores audio files in the /var/snd directory of your system. What we're going to do is point that directory to an external drive.

Plug in your external drive to your system. Now we need to edit the external drive's options. We recommend using Gnome Disks to do this. You can normally find it under System or Accessories. Usually, it's called Disks. If it's not installed use the following command in a terminal to install it.

sudo apt install gnome-disk-utility

In Disks you should see your external drive listed. Select it and you'll see all that disk's information. At this stage, you can choose to format your external drive. We recommend the ext4 format or exFAT if you need Windows compatibility. A guide on doing this can be found here.

Note The exFAT file system support is a relatively new addition to the Linux Kernel. If you don't have it as a format option you can install the exFAT tools using the following commands. You may need to reboot to fully complete the install.

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse
sudo apt-get install exfat-utils

Next, still using Disks, we need to tell the system to mount your external drive to /var/snd. Click on the Additional Partition Options button, which looks like two cogs. Select Edit Mount Options.... Make sure User Session Defaults is switched off. Tick the Mount at System Startup option. Now in the Mount Point box enter /var/snd. Now click the OK button and enter your password.

Now restart your device. Once restarted you can double-check if your external drive has mounted correctly using Disks. Select your drive and at the bottom of the information, it should say Mounted at /var/snd.

If you run into issues importing audio into RDLibrary, this may be a permissions problem. You can run the following command in a terminal to adjust the pi user's permissions.

sudo chmod 775 /var/snd