Mounting filesystem in ram with tmpfs

I’m recording some video on my Raspberry Pi and I don’t want to write to the SD-card. I want to do some processing on the video before sending it out, though, so I need to save it somewhere. Saving it in RAM is ideal both for speed and its transientness.

First create the folder to hold the new file system

$ mkdir /home/alarm/tmp

Then add the mount record to /etc/fstab for automatically mounting on boot

# echo 'tmpfs /home/alarm/tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,size=50m,noexec,mode=1700 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

Mount the fs

# mount -a

Test

$ echo 'Hello, world!' >> ~/tmp/foobar

Now, reboot, and all files within the mount path will be gone. Forever

References

• man mount