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.
You can also use exFAT if you want cross platform support. It’s had a Linux kernel driver for quite a while now.