Format and Mount

Warning
Formatting a device/volume erases all existing data on a device, if a file system already exists on the target device/volume. If you need to retain the data on your volume, you should skip to the mount section below.

You can verify the device name that your attached volume will have in your instance in the Attached To column on the Volumes | Volumes page on your Nectar dashboard.

In your instance you can see the attached Volume as a Block Device using the lsblk (list block devices) command.

$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vda    252:0    0  10G  0 disk
└─vda1 252:1    0  10G  0 part /
vdb    252:16   0  60G  0 disk /mnt
vdc    252:32   0  65G  0 disk

Depending on how you created your volume, it may not have a file system and you need to create one before mounting, i.e. format the device. The exact format command syntax is dependent on the virtual machine’s operating system and the type of file system you need. The example below formats the volume attached as /dev/vdc’ in the Ubuntu-based instance using the ext4 filesystem.

$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/vdc

To make your volume/device available to the operating system you need to mount it on a directory called a mount point. You can mount your device using an in-memory-only mount, but the mount will be lost upon rebooting your instance. We recommend you configure the mounting of your device/volume filesystem persistently using the configuration file /etc/fstab. In both examples we will create a mount point called /pvol.

In memory only

You can use below commands to create a mount point called /pvol and to mount the device /dev/vdc at that mount point.

$ sudo mkdir /pvol
$ sudo mount /dev/vdc /pvol -t auto

Using /etc/fstab

To ensure that your Volume is remounted after a reboot of your instance, you should configure it in the file /etc/fstab.

First create the mount point /pvol using:

$ sudo mkdir /pvol

Then use a text editor to open the /etc/fstab file. You can do this with the command below. We are using the nano text editor in this example but you can use whichever text editor your prefer, just replace nano with the name of the text editor (Vim etc).

 sudo nano /etc/fstab

You can then add the following line to /etc/fstab. The /dev/vdc is the device you’re mounting and /pvol is the its target mount point.

/dev/vdc  /pvol    auto    defaults,nofail   0  2

After adjusting the /etc/fstab file you need to initiate any changes. Use the mount all command:

$ sudo mount --all

You may have to change ownership or write privileges to enable writing to the ephemeral storage, using chown, chgrp or chmod, e.g.

$ sudo chown ubuntu:ubuntu /pvol

Note
Your use-case or operating system may require different details or a different approach than this example.