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.
NTFS reads/writes fine on Linux. But if anything goes wrong then you might need a utility to fix it (Mostly caused by sudden unplugging). If you have the option, I would suggest you format and the media drive in EXT4. Mind you, EXT4 can only be read by Linux systems.
I shudder to think of “if anything goes wrong.” I really need some sort of redundancy for this drive. It all started with “I’m going to get a big drive so I can backup my phone,” and it’s grown to “I have 5 phones worth of memories and 3 terabytes of YouTube channels downloaded onto this single drive.” lol
I was having problems with NTFS HDDs when I was dual booting. Needing to get into windows for solving them. Then I ditched Windows, reformatted my drives to EXT4 and never looked back.
But now I am using EXT4 with LUKS for encryption.
Which distro are you on?
I don’t know what your financial status is, but a nice Synology NAS unit is a terrific investment. I’m really happy with the one I got a while back.
My financial status is I’m trying to figure out if starting a church to grift people will make me feel bad, lol. I’ll probably use one of the old PCs I have laying around and turn it into some sort of homebrew nas. Hopefully before it’s too late but probably not until I have a close call.
As already suggested, for portable media exFAT is the way to go. Might also need an additional package not immediately installed by default, but nothing a quick apt-get install or dnf install won’t sort out in a second.
Portable is a strong word. It’s not so much a portable drive as it is a desktop external HDD that utilizes USB for data transfer. Technically portable, but not really made to toss in your pocket. It wouldn’t be an external drive if I hadn’t run out of headers before I wanted it. And I already had stuff on my other drives so I couldn’t just swap one out. I mean, I could, but I dedicate them to things - system drive, games, raw video captures to edit, exported videos that have been edited / miscellaneous, and then this external drive for phone backups and archived media.
You can also use exFAT if you want cross platform support. It’s had a Linux kernel driver for quite a while now.