[HLUG] SATA drive question

[grhmc at lavabit.com]

Taking George's advice on backing up wholesale to an external hard disk,
my first step has been the purchase of a disk. It's got SATA drive so I
need to know:

1 Will it be easy from linux to do a backup of my complete home file to
this external disk

2 Could I also put other files on to the disk from a completely different
system, eg a digital camera or an XP system.

thanks

Graham