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.
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.