File Formats - FAT32, NTFS?

[Kaelan?]

So I got a new external hard drive to back up all the crap I have on my laptop that I hardly use but don't want to delete (.ISOs, videos, music, etc) and it came preformatted as FAT32.

I've heard some people recommending you reformat to NTFS as soon as you get it before using it and that WinXP doesn't really like dealing with FAT32, but I'm not sure how important this is. I'd do it anyway, but I've only remembered the formatting thing a couple minutes ago, right after I had already backed up about 50gigs of stuff on it.

Should I just reformat it and start backing everything up again or does it not really make that much difference? Do I have to have both drives on the same format to use them properly?

[Kaisha]

Only main differences I found between FAT32/NTFS as far as backups go is that FAT32 has a file-size limitation of 4gb, and has larger clusters. (32kb iirc, where-as NTFS is a bit dynamic in that regard)

For me regarding my external, I just stuck to FAT32 since it makes life a hell lot easier when it comes to backing up stuff onto it an OS other than Windows that doesn't have full read/write support for NTFS right out of the box. (re: OSX <.<)

In your case since you have ISOs, it may be be better to stick to NTFS to avoid the 4gb file limitation, unless you have no problems splitting all your files that are larger than that up into smaller chunks.

[Ratatapa]

There's also the thing if you wanna but some encryption/quota etc that isisn't supporte on FAT32