dr100B
Nobody knows absolutely for sure, but if your drive has TRIM (I think most/all WD SMRs and probably a number of Seagates by now too) it should be enough to blkdiscard everything (it’s an instant operation, can be done specifically or it’s done sometimes by various tools when formatting, removing partitions, etc.).
2TB drives probably shouldn’t be bought anymore with SSDs solidly into double digits and dipping lower and lower.
There is no complete solution, not by a long shot.
You could save all files you can grab from everywhere, buy Google space and enable absolutely all possible backups, use the specific data transfer (to a new phone!) tool from the manufacturer (no matter if Google or Samsung or anyone else) and you’d STILL have tons of apps with tons of data you need to move with a specific workflow (best example Whatsapp, but this is a GOOD example, in the sense that people really want their data and have a process to move it). Repeat for anything similar, login (separately, sometimes via a rather complex process) to everything else and STILL you’ll be having tons of things that weren’t carried over, you need to configure by hand and so on. You’ll be fighting with this for weeks, if not months if you have more than 2-3 apps.
Try wget.
Ideally don’t take a Sandisk, but really anything else.
I bought last time DVDs in August of 2007 and CDs way earlier. They still work whenever I need one (and I’ll probably never get to use them all). Write, verify, move along.
exFAT will work just fine for pictures and videos, it’s stuff like databases or maildir (saving the emails one email=one file) or other similar workloads that are the problem. Also it’ll disable write cache usually and you could just yank the drive.
I’d keep all “working drives”, the ones that are used mostly as an internal drive even if external (a block device is a block device despite some people here needing a fainting couch when they read the letters “USB”). Everything for backups, to be used between multiple persons or computers I’d do exFAT. Mostly because it’s MISSING the following (from annoying to dangerous to disastrous): permissions, junctions (links) and EFS.
There’s no more unlimited. Jottacloud openly throttle you (probably you could do 10-20TBs eventually given enough time, but not considerably more) and I think OpenDrive finds reasons to kick you out around 10TBs?
Are they your files? Just dump them by major event (like “trip to”, “X’s wedding”) or period if nothing special happened (/2023/“08 Home Summer” - I always put numerical month before so they get sorted). Then use some kind of software to organize them further (automatically, by place/date/face/object recognition, etc.) https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/17l7230/bleedingedge_selfhosted_photo_software_in_2023_im/
rclone of course.
It depends which program you’re using, for example even tar will preserve hard links. Or on the other side something like duplicacy will just deduplicate everything that has the same content.