[Techtalk] Partitioning hard drives

[Indefatigable42]

This is a sort of general question that I started wondering about while
trying to plan my new machine. It's going to be a dual boot system running
Windows XP and some version of Linux (probably Ubuntu, as I know people who
use it). Once again, I'm not sure whether techtalk or newchix is the best
place for it.

I'm trying to figure out an efficient way to keep my system backed up. In
terms of hardware, I wanted to get a big internal drive and partition it,
and then get a smaller external drive to back up only the files that I can't
reinstall from scratch (for example, software preferences, word processor
documents, photo albums, etc.). This way I wouldn't have to back up the
entire system or use a RAID array, and the backup drive could be physically
isolated from the main system for safety's sake when it's not connected.

My question is, can an external hard drive be partitioned like the internal
one, so that the Windows and Linux backups both have partitions that match
their own file structure? Or should I have two separate small external
drives, one for Linux and one for Windows?

Brenda