Reformatting

It was running a 15 year old NTFS and it seems to have become (at least partially) corrupted. I decided to do the hardcore thing and reformat all of it. A nifty site¹ told me about the mkfs program, which made a lot of sense since I am long-since converted to the values of ext4. I was surprised to learn that my system already had the mkfs program on it, so away we went!

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

After this my copy over for my backup was startlingly fast.

Footnotes

¹ The most useful bit here: https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/07/how-to-format-and-mount-a-usb-drive-in-the-linux-terminal/