[BackupPC-users] How do I use an external USB drive as backup target?

Hello:
I am considering using an external USB drive as the storage for my backups.
I am running backup pc under Debian 5.0.
Part 1
What do I need to do to configure the USB disk as the target? (e.g. how do I do it?)
The USB disk is currently formatted as a NTFS file system. Do I *need* to reformat it to ext3? or other?

Part 2
Assume I am crazy paranoid about preserving backup data and I get a second USB drive to serve as a backup to the first USB drive.
Also assume that I am not concerned about the bandwidth across the network or the various buses.

From a data reliability standpoint, is it better to run a backup session to USB drive 1, and then repeat the backup to USB drive 2? OR
run a backup session to USB drive 1, and then copy the backup directories to USB drive 2???
The first approach could have errors in different backed up files on disk 1 or 2 but given the odds, very unlikely that the same exact error would show up
in the same exact way in the same file across both USB disks.
OTOH, the second approach would allow the exact error in the backup on USB disk 1 to be copied to USB disk 2.

I am leaning towards repeating the backup on two drives.

My understanding is that files that are backed up (using either rsync or smb) are 'encrypted' (for lack of a better word), and to view them I need to use zcat.-True?

Also, can the backup profile be specified to perform complete data copies periodically, as opposed to a baseline and then periodic incrementals?

Lastly, does anyone have a statistical number that represents the probability of a backup file (e.g. on the target backup disk) containing an error introduced
by the backup procedure? I know there are error probabilities for both disk and tape reads/writes failures, but am wondering if anything like that exists for the backup software. (A group I used to work with did this sort of testing, and actually had some statistics on the reliability of backup programs, wrt types of files, sizes, w/wo compression, and the types of compression. Not sure the open source community would go through this type of assessment - but thought I'd ask.
Thanks for your help

-John

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