I have a small external backup drive where I dump my phone camera captures and archive YouTube channels - nothing special; a few terabytes, mostly mp4s.
Is there anything I need to do before/after I swap?
If it matters, the drive is 9TB, formatted as NTFS, and connected via USB 3.0.
I also have 4 internal drives, but I’m not so much worried about them, as I plan on just formatting everything but the external.


There are no stupid questions.
Linux has been able to read any drive I have ever tried. NTFS is readable and writeable. I would bet almost all distros support ntfs. if they dont you can install ntfs-3g.
Edit: i dont usually use ntfs so I went and had a quick search, to make sure I wasnt wrong and remembering the right driver name. I also didnt think about drive health checks that they lightly cover in the link.
https://linuxvox.com/blog/does-linux-support-ntfs/
Nice. Thanks :)