Anytime! We should get rid of the security thru obscurity notion that prevailed with Mac and iOS.

The iOS doesn’t disable the port, if you connect to a Linux machine and see the dmesgs you’ll see the phone communicating with the host and reporting lockdown mode so your software can indicate you to unlock the device. But is still sending data about itself, and if you put the device in recovery mode and is vulnerable to a bootrom exploit the contents of the flash could theoretically be dumped without the need for a password. Without mentioning the data that could be extracted and used to profile/fingerprint such as MAC Address, SN, IMEI, ICCID of your SIM, etc…

Mac OS Mavericks went EOL 5 months ago. I would strongly recommend that you move to something still getting security updates.

Yeah, Monterey. Not Mavericks.

Did you even read that I use Monterey?

You are right, it is not very POSIX compatible anymore. I stopped updating my Mac at Monterey simply because they started doing what seems like a walled garden approach for their operative systems, for the software releases and installing binaries from non-approved sources makes you jump through hoops and is necessary to disable their crap most users won’t touch. But this is not even that old, IIRC it started going downhill when Mac OS X Mavericks was released.

Both being POSIX compatible doesn’t make them related, is just a standard way of deploying portable operating systems from the early days.

Basically, I specifically want cold storage, and not cloud. I will only add, not delete from it. And I don’t want it encrypted.

I have a client with a photographic studio. To give you an estimate, his data is around 14TB of mostly camera pictures with approximately 20 years or history and the owner believe it or not, relies on multiple external hard drives for cold storage, he has a 2TB Seagate thats like 2011-2012 old which still works.

To put in a cupboard tho, M disc is your best bet.