Frequently Asked Question

What's the difference between /mnt and /media?

Both are mount points for filesystems other than the root, but the FHS gives them slightly different roles. /mnt is the traditional administrator's mount point: somewhere to attach a filesystem manually, on the fly, when you need to inspect a recovered disk or copy data off a backup drive. Convention is to mount under a named subdirectory such as /mnt/backup or /mnt/oldroot and unmount when you're done. Scripts and packages should not assume anything will be present at /mnt.

/media is where the desktop environment's automounter parks removable media, USB sticks, SD cards, optical discs, usually as /media/<username>/<volume-label>/. The separation is a hint to the user interface: a file manager will show a device under /media with an eject icon and a notification, while a filesystem you mounted by hand at /mnt/foo is invisible to the GUI's safe-removal machinery. Some distributions collapse the two and put everything under /run/media/<user>/ instead.