Do I need to partition external drive?

I'm about to format my first external hard drive and am unsure whether I need to partition it as I'm new to this (my experience of backing up is limited to emailing files to my webmail provider's server). I bought the drive primarily for backup in case something catastrophic happens to my Mac but I understand an external drive has other useful functions; question is, are they useful to me?
One friend said I should make the external drive bootable.
Another said I could put my iTunes on it to free up space on my Mac. I have just over 50GB of music (but this is constantly expanding) and 147GB free on the Mac's drive.
Ideally I'd like to back up automatically every night.
All comments welcome, thanks.

Keep it simple. If you have the space just clone the entire internal drive to the external on a regular basis. Most all backup utilities have a scheduler option. You don't need to partition it. If you have a logical volume disc error the other partitions may still work fine. If you have a hard drive failure you can lose all the partitions.
Some uses for multiple partitions: different OS versions, if you want to boot in 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, or boot camp into WinXP or Vista, each of these can reside in it's own separate partition. Software developers (who can't afford multiple machines?) sometimes test software on different OS versions using a multiple boot system.
Some say that disc access times are slightly improved when searching over a smaller partition as opposed to the whole large drive, not sure if this is really true or not, or if the difference is really significant. So you might boot faster from a smaller partition with just the OS on it, and with User files on another partition, or apps might launch faster when read from a smaller partition, again that's just speculation.
(And, not applicable to your situation, but some older computers/OSs require it, for example the old out-of-production Beige Power Macintosh G3 Desktop computers can only boot OS X from the first partition <8GB in size on the built-in ATA bus. Also, OS 9 can not boot from a partition larger than 200GB.)

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    Hi Michel-Ange
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    This is a re-post with additional background information requested by several responders:
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    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2472139
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    Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
    - Gandalf

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    Yogabob wrote:
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