I have a dual boot system, Tahr Puppy and Windows XP.

I have an external 500 Gb drive that is only used for backups and is NTFS.

Would there be any advantage to giving it 2 partions, one NTFS and one ext3 ?

If I were you, I would format the hard drive NTFS, why, because windows doesn't support ext3/ext4, but linux does support NTFS. You could make 2 partitions, but you won't be able to access the ext3 partition in windows. (actually you can, but it's difficult and doesn't always work, http://www.ext2fsd.com/). I would advise you to make the partition in windows, because making NTFS partitions in linux is buggy, and might not work. 2 partitions is an option, but you might end up with a partition that is too small, and then you would have to resize the partitions and might lose data. I don't think there is any advantage to having multiple partitions, but that's just my opinion.

NTFS doesn't support the full range of Linux ownership/permissions/attributes, so simply copying files to/from that filesystem would lose some of that information.

Thanks Andrew for the helpful info.

I found that out when I tried to makes some files immutable that were on the NTFS partition. :-)

windows can read ext2/ext3/ext4 and even writing is possible, but probably not safe. see ext2fs and this. Splitting the drive means lower the available space too.

I am using ext2fs. Have had no problems with read or write operations.

Now vlc is another topic ? :-)

I can not get mplayer 2 work either.:-(

Hello Friends,
I don't use external drive for backup. Last time I use external drive but its crash and lost all my data. My friend suggest me a cloud Backup solution. Now I use CloudBacko for my backup. It is a best backup software and very fast, secure and easy. It's support Windows, Linux, Mac, UNIX etc.

Thanks, I am trying to get Cloud backup going but am having some difficuties.