Some time ago, when testing a script, I - by accident - targeted my projects storage device in an incredibly destructive manner - using /dev/sda1 
.
Although I lost a lot of data - it was not catastrophic - but as one always try to learn from my mistakes, I began to investigate the options of renaming device links.
udev documentation indicates supporting this but I cannot make this particular rule work.
An udev rule has three parts
|<--- ACTIONs ---->| |<-------------------- FILTERs ------------------->| |<--------- CHANGEs ---------------->|
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV{ID_WWN}==<world wide name>", SYMLINK+="<my-disk-name>%n"
First I find the values which uniquely identifies the device
udevadm info --query=all /dev/sda | grep -i -E 'serial|wwn'
S: disk/by-id/wwn-0x5002538844584d30
E: ID_SERIAL=Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_500GB_mSATA_S1KMNSAFB02237V
E: ID_SERIAL_SHORT=S1KMNSAFB02237V
E: ID_WWN=0x5002538844584d30
E: ID_WWN_WITH_EXTENSION=0x5002538844584d30
E: DEVLINKS=/dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:05:00.0-ata-4.0 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_500GB_mSATA_S1KMNSAFB02237V /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5002538844584d30 /dev/disk/by-diskseq/1 /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:05:00.0-ata-4
Create the rule using the chosen identifier - in this case I use the world wide name.
The symlink value must be unique and not anything which is reserved by the kernel.
Save the rule as /etc/udev/rules.d/10-safe-name.rules
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ENV{ID_WWN}=="0x5002538844584d30", SYMLINK+="my_vbox%n"
The rule verification is solid
udevadm verify
Reload all rules
udevadm control --reload
Trigger the device rules
udevadm trigger --type=devices --action=change
Based on the rule I expect /dev/sda changing to /dev/my_vbox and the only partition to be /dev/my_vbox1.
Not even a reboot changes this.
I am having a hard time figuring out what I am missing.
EDIT:
It turns out there is a rule file named /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules which appears to override my rule.
From the content of that file it seems I need lessons in writing udev rules.