cloudstic source discover

Overview

The cloudstic source discover command scans the current machine for local backup source candidates — the root filesystem and any mounted portable/external drives — and prints them in a format suitable for onboarding decisions. It’s the discovery step that cloudstic setup workstation uses internally to find portable drives, but you can also run it standalone to see what Cloudstic would find, or to feed the results into your own tooling with -json.

Basic Usage

cloudstic source discover [options]

What It Finds

Discovery is OS-aware:

macOS: the root volume (/), plus anything mounted under /Volumes/ (treated as portable)
Linux: the root filesystem (/), plus anything mounted under /media/, /run/media/, or /mnt/ on a /dev/ device (treated as portable)
Windows: fixed drives (the system drive C:\ is not portable; other fixed drives are), plus removable drives (always portable)

Discovery only looks at mounted local filesystems. It does not discover SFTP servers, Google Drive, or OneDrive sources — those are configured directly with cloudstic profile new or cloudstic setup workstation.

For each candidate, Cloudstic reports:

Source URI — a ready-to-use local:<mount> source URI
Display name — the drive/volume name if available, otherwise derived from the mount point
Mount point
Identity — a stable volume identity hint (e.g. volume UUID/label), when the platform exposes one
FS type, when known
Portable — whether the source is treated as a portable/external drive rather than a fixed system volume

Command Flags

boolean

default:"false"

Only show portable/external source candidates (skip the fixed root/system volume).

boolean

default:"false"

Write discovered sources as JSON instead of a table.

Examples

cloudstic source discover

cloudstic source discover -portable-only

cloudstic source discover -json

Example Output

NAME          SOURCE URI              MOUNT           IDENTITY   FS      PORTABLE
Macintosh HD  local:/                 /                          apfs    no
Backup Drive  local:/Volumes/Backup   /Volumes/Backup  a1b2c3     apfs    yes

If nothing is found:

No sources discovered.

JSON Output

[
  {
    "source_uri": "local:/",
    "display_name": "Macintosh HD",
    "mount_point": "/",
    "fs_type": "apfs",
    "portable": false
  },
  {
    "source_uri": "local:/Volumes/Backup",
    "display_name": "Backup Drive",
    "mount_point": "/Volumes/Backup",
    "identity": "a1b2c3",
    "fs_type": "apfs",
    "portable": true
  }
]

The identity field (volume UUID/label, when available) helps preserve backup lineage for portable drives even if the mount point changes between sessions.

Relationship to Workstation Setup

cloudstic source discover is the same discovery logic that powers cloudstic setup workstation, which combines it with OS-aware folder suggestions to build a full onboarding plan. Use source discover directly when you just want to see what portable drives are currently attached, or when scripting around discovery output.

Onboarding

Interactive Mode

Repository Management

Backup & Restore

Maintenance

Key Management

Configuration

Utilities

cloudstic source discover

Overview

Basic Usage

What It Finds

Command Flags

Examples

Example Output

JSON Output

Relationship to Workstation Setup

See Also

​Overview

​Basic Usage

​What It Finds

​Command Flags

​Examples

​Example Output

​JSON Output

​Relationship to Workstation Setup

​See Also

Overview

Basic Usage

What It Finds

Command Flags

Examples

Example Output

JSON Output

Relationship to Workstation Setup

See Also