How to set up ramdisk in Linux - A very simple guide

RAMDisk is a kind of storage that uses a portion of RAM storage capacity to store files. Although the ramdisk provides a huge speed improvements over HDD and even SSDs, but the main problem is all the files inside the ramdisk will disappear when you turn off your PC or even unexpected shutdown happens. The usage of ramdisk is mainly for speeding up the caching process and also used for making video rendering process much faster.

To set up the ramdisk, you will need to create a directory in the folder /mnt/ramdisk and also set the permission to allow full access:

sudo mkdir /mnt/ramdisk
sudo chmod 777 /mnt
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/ramdisk

Then, you will need to create a new ramdisk, make sure that your PC should have at least 4GB RAM:

sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=1GB myramdisk /mnt/ramdisk

To unmount the ramdisk, just type this command below:

sudo umount /mnt/ramdisk

If you're wanting to automount the ramdisk, put these lines in /etc/fstab file:

myramdisk /mnt/ramdisk tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,defaults,size=1G,x-gvfs-show 0 0

Ok...what about saving and loading the ramdisk data? Well, you can do it by using tar compression to save and load the ramdisk data.

To save the ramdisk data, just run the command below:

tar -czvf ~/ram-backup.tar.gz /mnt/ramdisk

To load the ramdisk data, you will need to run bunch of the command lines here, assuming that you're using /home/username directory:

tar -xvf ram-backup.tar.gz 
cd mnt/ramdisk
cp -r * /mnt/ramdisk
rm -rf ~/mnt

If you want to make it much more simpler without needing to run the command manually every time, just create the script file and put these command like these below under designated files:

i) save as ramdisk-backup.sh

tar -czvf ~/ram-backup.tar.gz /mnt/ramdisk

ii) save as ramdisk-restore.sh

tar -xvf ram-backup.tar.gz 
cd mnt/ramdisk
cp -r * /mnt/ramdisk
rm -rf ~/mnt

Then, apply both script files to enable execution:

chmod 777 ramdisk-restore.sh
chmod 777 ramdisk-backup.sh

Finally, put the script command under designed bash profiles

i) Put into .bash_profile

./ramdisk-restore.sh

ii) Put into .bash_logout

./ramdisk-backup.sh