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 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.
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?
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.