New External Hard-Drive format issue

[J]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 18:58, M. Milanuk <memilanuk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow.  Someone is apparently off their meds...

Probably a good reason why he's "A former tech" ;-)

To answer the OPs questions though,

Question 1:
If you are going to use that disk at all on a non-Linux system (e.g.
Windows) you can not format it using any of the Linux filesystems.

If you have ANY need or desire to use that disk between both windows
and linux systems, you need to either partition it to create a windows
partition (NTFS) and a Linux partition (ext2, ext3 or ext4), or you
need to just keep the whole thing formatted as NTFS: the modern NTFS
support in Linux is pretty good, definitely not like the old days
where writing to an NTFS partition could corrupt the entire partition
or worse ;-)

Question 2:
If you repartition and reformat, then yes, you'll lose all that
stuff... but then again, do you even really need it?  Are you HONESTLY
going to use it, or just worried about keeping it around because you
MIGHT need it some day?

There are plenty of other cross-platform encryption tools out there
(TrueCrypt being my current favorite).  As for backup, why can't you
use the disk as it is?  I have a 500GB disk (NTFS formatted) that I
use between one of my linux boxes and my wifes XP box.  Her automated
backup software (whatever it was that came with the disk) backs up her
stuff into one directory, and my rsync script backs up my stuff into a
different directory.  All works well, no problems.