[plug] formatting new external usb hardrive

[Sol]

I've finally gotten around my backup slackness (I hope!) and have bought
a usb hard drive. I've just been going through some simple yet useful
instructions on how to  format and mount it that I found here (for the
benefit of those thinking about doing the same):

http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/main/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=561

In part of this article it asks me to mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1. I'm doing
this now but I'm wondering if this is the way to go because both the
server and laptop I want to back up use reiserfs? I was going to tar
everything under / for the initial backup and then us rsync from there
onwards to keep things up to date. Will this work? Or are there some
horrible nasties lying in wait for me when I actually need to recover
from backup?

thanks; sol