What formatting for external hard drives for my photo students?

Question

I teach digital photography. Our classroom Macs are a mix of Intel and PPC (iMac 20", G5s). My students typically either come with a Mac laptop, buy one while here, or soon after they leave. Some (few!) have a PC laptop or will leave to go home to a PC laptop.
I've been buying one external harddrive per student (with FW800, FW400, USB 2.0, 250 GB) from macsales.com for students to put their digital photos on while here and when they leave my 12 wk. course. I encourage them if they have a Mac laptop to partition their external drive to have one partition for backing up their boot drive, one for their photos.
In the classroom, they may be hooking up their external drive to a PPC or Intel Mac.
What recommendations can you give for what formatting they should be using for their external drives? Intel, for PPC, or...MS-DOS (if they go to a PC)? (One student told me that her external drive which was formated for PPC last summer now won't show up on her MacBook Pro.)
I realize they can only use the FW800 on a few Macs (including 17" MacBook Pro, Mac Pro), and should not be using USB 2.0 for a drive they hope to boot a Mac with. I've heard formatting and using MS-DOS is very unstable (for PCs at least).
Tips, please?
2x2.66 GHz Mac Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   5 GB RAM

Answer 1

I've been buying one external harddrive per student
(with FW800, FW400, USB 2.0, 250 GB) from
macsales.com for students to put their digital photos
on while here and when they leave my 12 wk. course. I
encourage them if they have a Mac laptop to partition
their external drive to have one partition for
backing up their boot drive, one for their photos.
That's impressive and very user-supportive. At work, our students have space on our server to backup/store their work for the semester but are greatly encouraged to backup their stuff with either Cds or DVDs (and we don't supply those). If they use a personal machine, they are responsible for their own backups of their system.
In the classroom, they may be hooking up their
external drive to a PPC or Intel Mac.
For data, the traditional APM formatted drive work with both.
What recommendations can you give for what formatting
they should be using for their external drives?
Intel, for PPC, or...MS-DOS (if they go to a PC)?
(One student told me that her external drive which
was formated for PPC last summer now won't show up
on her MacBook Pro.)
As I mentioned earlier, an Intel Mac can boot from an APM formatted drive although this may or may not be the best solution. Unfortunately with partitioning via Disk Utility (and perhaps other tools as well - I've not investigated this yet), every partition must be of the same scheme GUID or APM.
The most important reason for backups (IMHO) is to safeguard personal work. The OS can be re-installed anytime and settings reconfigured if need be. Since the APM scheme can be used by both Intels and PPC for data, I would go with APM. Bootable or not, their important data will be backed up.
(I don't know why one student had a problem but it shouldn't be related to the partition scheme.)
For a bootable system/backup, I use Carbon Copy Cloner from Mike Bombich. Ideally, so long as there is space, I create a restorable image of a fresh OS install and put it away for a rainy day. I then clone my entire internal drive to the external (APM). Over the last year, I've been able to boot from it on my original iMac CD as well as have a hard copy of my work.
Once backed up, I would later use the option to only copy changed files instead of re-doing the entire drive. That was a feature in the PPC version of the app (which will run under Intel) although I haven't tried the latest universal version (3.0 beta). There are a number of other applications that can perform backups/cloning as well.