So I setup Kopia to backup my drives. Several non-system drives. I’m already worried that Kopia significantly reduced their lifespan by continuing needlessly re-scanning them over and over. Can Kopia just use system hooks or at least “Modify Date” metadata in file tables, instead of doing complete re-scans?
And what makes you believe that kopia is doing complete re-scan?
Note that in case of mechanical disk even metadata only scan (which should be what kopia does for subsequent snapshots) can take long time especially if you have a lot of files, disk is heavily fragmented maybe using ExFAT filesystem etc. Every file mtime has to be checked. If you have 1 million files it means 1 million read operations.