cloning drive

[Alessia]

Hello
I have the same problem in some way, I would to copy all my home 
(/home)partition to an external hard drive ( usb one) to migrate fron 
6.10 to 7(festy). About this I have some question

I have to set a specific etx3 partition in the external harddrive or can 
I leave the original filesystem (fat32)

how can menage the permision issues when I'll re-copy the backuped /home 
in the newly installed Kubuntu Festy?
I think I have to create the same user with the same password,but if I 
create  ext3 partition how handle the permissions when I backup the home?

What will happen to kde or other programs config files (most of them are 
hidden files)that resides in /home?

Thanks to all
Alessia