Ah yeah okay, I see, that would be quite tedious to implement in bash. Everything looks pretty neat. :D

Buuut I just looked at KDE’s search framework filter options (used by dolphin if you press <crtl> + f ) and it seems it is indeed possible to search/filter by exposure time with dolphin or via directly in the cli.

Have you tried RTFM? :P

Jokes aside afaik you could do everything you mentioned with sort, find (with -type f, -printf and -mtime) and grep (filtering via regex with the -e flag).

Alternatively you could try KDE’s file explorer dolphin (or even just its search utility kfind) as a graphical alternative.

My point is switching to linux is not quick or easy, but there are few really impassable roadblocks (games with shitty kernel level anticheat for example) and there is a high likelyhood someone in this community has encountered your problems aswell and migjt even know a solution.

exfat or fat32 is great for interoperability between linux and windows but has limited functionality under linux.

If you’re using your external drive only under linux, I suggest switching to a filesystem that works better with unix like permissions and special bits.

Also, like others, depending on your use-case I would suggest something with journaling like ext3 or ext4. If you happen to power of your system while writing something to that drive, the fs does not get corrupted/can automatically recover.

For backups with rollback maybe a FS with copy on write and automatic compression like btrfs or zfs would be better.

With btrfs borg backups allows you to create incremental backups of btrfs subvolumes. I use it to backup my home, etc and /subvolumes on my “backup server” (old pc with two raid1 hdds).

I have a friend who administeres backups for his company (afaik ~100-200GB delta per week) and he swears by zfs. I found btrfs simpler though.