What does the message "indexing my passport for Mac" mean?

I am new to WD backing up my mac for the first time. I manually dragged all my files from desktop to the Passport. Now it is saying it is "indexing my passport for Mac. What does that mean? Have I made an error in dragging the files to the passport?

Hello,

It could be the Mac checking the files on the drive to make sure that it gathers all the basic information about the files.

Check if you have a backup software running on the Mac. Perhaps, time machine backup is running on the background.