[Mantazz]

I recently purchased a 3TB external drive that I plan to connect to my FBSD server, to use for backing up data from the server and other systems on the network. I seek advice on a few things:

First, is it advantageous to split it in to more than one partition? I'm leaning towards no, but I may be overlooking something. This would be only for backing up actual data, not software, system configuration, etc.

Second, what file system would be most useful for this, with specific attention paid towards maximum flexibility regarding the OS for a system that I may want to recover files to? In other words, while this system is running FBSD (8.1-Release), I may in the future need to connect it to a Linux or Mac OS (or even - though hopefully not - Windows) system to recover the files. I'm thinking ZFS might be a good choice for this situation, but I welcome input on the matter.