Activity led is helpful in troubleshooting so if it lights up then you know that at least device is getting power. Sometimes the faulty usb port/loose connection may cause no power or insufficient power to be supplied resulting in activity led either not lighting at all or turning on off rapidly. Samsung T7 is also good & it has activity led too.
From what I know macos does not support NTFS write without some free/paid addon to the macOS. Ex-fat is universally supported on both windows & mac but on windows using ex-fat means no file system integrity checks like ntfs has so better use checksums for your important data(checksum is a kind of value which is unique to every digital file kind of like fingerprint) so you create a checksum of imp data & save it in some notepad like file(or even put the checksum in filename) & then whenever you move data between drives you can again calculate the checksum of copied data & match it with original checksum value to confirm data was correctly copied/not corrupted during transfer.
Manually tracking checksum is not really practical.
Yes, for more than a few dozen files it is not practical. You can use a copy software like total commander or freefilesync with the option to verify copy process by matching checksums of source & destination data but keep in mind this will increase the whole process timing to almost double as entire data needs to be read 2 times(first time for copy, second time for checksum match).
That does not matter much. When there is bulk data to transfer, I will not be sitting and watching it happen. When it is smaller amount of data, double of a few mSec is immaterial. More importantly, are these kind of utility software available for MacOS?
Freefilesync is available for macos. I suggest to first experiment with test folders & dummy data to understand how such software works as choosing wrong setting/option may result in accidental deletion of data. Once you are familiarized with software interface & options then use it for your actual folders data tasks.
Thanks. You are a big help.Freefilesync is available for macos. I suggest to first experiment with test folders & dummy data to understand how such software works as choosing wrong setting/option may result in accidental deletion of data. Once you are familiarized with software interface & options then use it for your actual folders data tasks.
FreeFileSync
Download FreeFileSync 13.8. FreeFileSync is a free open source data backup software that helps you synchronize files and folders on Windows, Linux and macOS.freefilesync.org
APFS formatted drive won't be readable on windows pc without installing software on windows pc. Do not delete anything until you confirm that original data was copied correctly(this is where freefilesync will come into picture & at this point you should be familiar with this software after experimenting with it on test data & dummy folders). Ideally, you should not delete anything for which you don't have at least 2 copies of that data in 2 different locations(2 drives or 1 drive & 1 cloud storage).
I was not intending to be able to read the APFS drive on Windows.
That's good to know. Can you post the link of that plugin on app store for future reference?
Not sure which one he used. He is sleeping now because he is in another timezone but I just checked with another friend who uses iBoysoft NTFS for Mac.