the great re-backup-ening saga part 2

[kradeelav]

I FINALLY

AFTER THREE MORE HOURS THIS EVENING

figured out how to fix my backup external hard drive  ;__________;

(see below: a very small snapshot of my google-fu hell lol)


so last night, to catch you up, i had a hissy fit after my backup drive got full and wouldn't let me delete shit out of the trash folder, and (accidentally) wiped the fucker by reformatting it thinking it'd fix the error

oh it fixed that error, all right, and gave me five new ones :D
namely i had no earthly idea what to do with a freshly formatted disk

in bullet point format more for my own set of notes so i can do this again: 

• so u freshly reformatted a drive in disks, and at least made a new partition that's bigly enough to hold the backups
• install gparted as one of those 'gotta have' applications because u ain't doing this shit without that program .... i was mostly in either gparted or Disks (apps > utilities > disks) most of the time here.
• the first thing i noticed yesterday is that the 'mount' option for that partition was greyed out. this page let me know that i needed to sniff around mount options more, until i got the "mount: bad usage" error
• there was something else in here where i got past that point but got stuck at the 'why won't it let me make new folders in here'
• (listen there's at least 100+ pages in my firefox history i ain't scrolling through them all)
• (a lot of them kept pointing me in the direction of editing a /etc/fstab folder which i really didn't want to do. i find it easier to fuck up things in the command line than the GUI which at least nudges you to certain yes/no options and generally has a "are you sure" for anything potentially mission critical :D 
• after 20+ more tabs i realized that the permissions issues might be happening because it was being mounted in the /mnt/ folder, and not the /media/ folder
• so in Disks>clicking on the right partition>mount options, you can change the mount point manually without going through the terminal - just change it from /mnt/ to /media/($USER)
• however it STILL wasn't giving me the god damn permissions
• after a very helpful page suggested to go step by step by checking the health of the backup disk (was healthy), and started listing the behavior of a default healthy file system i read the fine print and had to double check what
• because. it turns out that i had it formatted as a FAT32 filesystem ..... which linux can't read the permissions of ......
• so, again, unmount the external hard drive, REFORMAT THE FKING THING with gparted to NTFS (i chose that one given the interoperability between linux/windows,) ... and also make sure that both the partition type itself in disks is NTFS and the contents is NTFS ...
• remount......
• it worrrrrrkssssssssssssssssssssssss
• i l i v e