>>>I bought a portable/external hard drive to use as a backup of my notebook hard drive. The portable/external drive is formatted FAT32 but my drive is NTFS. Will I have any problems if I XCOPY files from the NTFS drive to FAT32 drive and possibly (in case of a crash) restore files back to NTFS?
>>>
>>>Thank you in advance for any input.
>>
>>You should not have any problem.
>>
>>You could reformat the external drive to NTFS, but for a simple notebook backup it should do OK.
>
>Thank you for your help, Bill.

I think you should reformat the FAT32 to NTFS unless you have specific HW needing Fat32 (some older linux PVR offer only Fat32 and Ext2), as NTFS specialities like sparse streams, compressed dirs/files don't map into Fat32. I will not even think about more esoteric topics like encrypted files, data streams and so on.

But your best bet IMHO is to use an imaging tool like Acronis or Paragon, as this compresses your data and you can stay at Fat32. Quite a few external disks have such tools installed.

HTH

thomas