first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

sshfs and mount the remote fs locally. then you can use any editor/IDE you like.

enpass for password vault, it has integrated nextcloud sync. for me, adding another selfhosted app wasn’t worth it.