What are the acceptable and best file system formats for large capacity thumb drives?
The trend recently is to have computers come with only 256GB of storage and is not changeable. This is unsatisfactory to me so I suppose many people are going with high capacity thumb drives (2-8TB) as an external volume. This raises several questions for me.
1) They come with ExFAT formatting. I've read that it is not the best for keeping track of the files you store on it and data can be more easily lost. Is this correct? Is it fully compatible with the MacOS? I have been having troubles even getting it to mount on the desktop.
2) I have tried reformatting to APFS and sometimes it takes but then won't mount. So I reformat back to ExFAT and it won't mount. Does reformatting damage the drive?
3) I have to use the external volume large capacity Thumb Drives to store my largest folders which are Documents, Pictures, & Music. I can access them from my Desktop using aliases from the external volumes but I'm having a problem with the Photo Library which only looks in the the internal storage volume for its 'goto' Library folder. I have tried to correct the alias reference to the external volume drive but it will not accept it in an external volume. Is there a workaround for this ? My Photos Library is 145GB and my Music Library is 80GB and my Documents folder is 15GB. When they are all on the internal 256GB volume, it fills quickly and slows to a crawl or to a stop, and that is NOT acceptable. That is why I'm tying to operate them from an external Thumb Drive.
Mac mini, macOS 10.15
