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.
Word of warning on “Safe removal” of external harddrives: You really want to click “Eject” or “Safe removal” every time before unplugging. This is much more important than on Windows, due to the way Linux handles buffers and caching. A copy operation will be “finished” but still live in the write-cache and not securely written to disk.
NTFS is no problem (But as mentioned earlier in the thread the permission system is different). I usually format all my external devices with NTFS so they’ll work on both Linux and Windows machines without any fuss.
I usually format my external drives to exFAT since it’s fully supported R/W on all major operating systems, in the slim chance I have to use macOS.
Still, no need for the OP to reformat their drive; NTFS tends to work just fine.
Oh good point, these are modern times, exFAT is a thing now.
I remember years ago having issues that Ubuntu could mount exFAT, so avoided it ever since. But that was many years ago, with an old kernel.
I’m pretty neurotic about that anyway, but this drive is only external because I ran out of headers; I don’t plan on ever unplugging it. I do appreciate the info though
and on linux, the ‘sync’ command will manually flush the buffers if you’re worried about buffered data not being written to the drive.