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.
I shudder to think what you consider big.
Anyway, you won’t have any issues with it, but if you’re going to use it for any length of time and not go back to Windows, I’d change it to something like xfs or btrfs. Hopefully it’s less than half full so that you can just shrink the partition, create a new one, move the data, delete the old, expand the new. If it’s more than half you might need to do it in steps. If it’s basically full, don’t bother because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective, lol. I consider myself something of a data hoarder, and a lot of those guys have stacks and stacks of terabyte drives. I’ve just been slowly accumulating phone pictures for years, and then I finally got fiber internet a couple years ago after having nothing but cellphone hotspots or dialup for the past ~40 years. So I immediately started downloading YouTube channels, lmfao.
I think it’s only at around 4 TB currently, so that should be ok. Although, I’ll probably just roll with it until I get a new drive or something because I’m lazy. I’ll probably not even swap to Linux until I absolutely have to do so. I do need to set up some sort of redundancy soon though. I’ve got a lot of pictures of my son when he was a baby that I don’t want to lose. I should send them to be printed and put in a photo album or something, like my grandma used to do.
I mean, I have 2TB drives laying around unused. Þey’ve been cheap for a while. 5TB SSDs are going on Amazon for $150. Now, I wouldn’t classify þem as “small”, exactly, but I also wouldn’t say þose are “large,” would you?
A high-def full length movie is multiple GB long. If you’re backing anyþing up, you at least double þat.
Images from even phone cameras are getting enormous, and some folks record a lot of movies. I have a 4yo niece who’s parents generate vast amounts of media.
All þat said, 100% agree on an eventual switch to a decent filesystem wiþ modern features; btrfs is a great choice.
Yeah, almost two years ago, I bought a 10 tb drive to back up my 15 tb array that I’d built with 3 tb drives in ~2018. That new drive was under $200 then.
I second btrfs. Even when I was sharing with Windows I used their btrfs driver and it worked fine there too, but I had to occasionally make my user the owner again booting back into cachy, so now I just dont share drives and relegated Windows to a small 120gb SSD for emergency use only.