Mounting USB NTFS drive on host at startup & sharing it with VMs

[jaytee129]

I was able to mount an external USB drive (NTFS formatted) on proxmox host using:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/pve/USBDrive (after installing ntfs-3g, looking up drive name, and creating mount point)

I could then go into Data Centre -> Storage -> Add -> Directory and point to /mnt/dev/USBDrive then create a Backup that uses that directory/drive

Question 1: drive disappears when I reboot and I can't find the right commands and location for them to have it remounted at startup (using ntfs-3g)

Question 2: how to expose it (the directory, I guess, not the drive) for use by multiple VM's (or even 1 of multiple is not possible) without causing it to unmount from host so backups can still use it. Is that possible?

Question 3: if I were to remove the USB drive to move the data elsewhere or replace it with another USB drive, will everything just work, or will I have to start over when I put drive back in or new one? Is there anything I need/can do for things to 'just work'?

Any info would be appreciated.

 

[bbgeek17]

Question 1: drive disappears when I reboot and I can't find the right commands and location for them to have it remounted at startup (using ntfs-3g)

google: "fstab ntfs-3g example"

Question 2: how to expose it (the directory, I guess, not the drive) for use by multiple VM's (or even 1 of multiple is not possible) without causing it to unmount from host so backups can still use it. Is that possible?

easiest is to present the mountpoint via NFS/CIFS to your VMs

Question 3: if I were to remove the USB drive to move the data elsewhere or replace it with another USB drive, will everything just work, or will I have to start over when I put drive back in or new one? Is there anything I need/can do for things to 'just work'?

If you remove the disk without properly unmounting it, you risk data corruption, hung mounts and processes.
If you insert new one, you will need to format/mount it again, probably restart other related processes (cifs/nfs/pve/etc)

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