Now I have a decision to make..

Okay well I got my new 500Gb hard drive to which I have already copied over my music, pictures, videos, and school work. Now I just downloaded SuperDuper and was going to set up a scheduled backup of my entire hard drive as a disk image.

I didn't know that my drive had to be formated for Mac. Right now I have it as FAT32 so that if I wanted to I would be able to hook it up to my old PC and back up some other files on there that I don't have on my Mac yet. I would really feel a lot safer if I could do a complete image backup of my MBP's hard drive, but I don't know if I want to reformat the hard drive. I guess I could always grab the little stuff off of my old PC and put it on my flash drive, then pop the flash drive into my Mac and transfer it from there. Maybe I should just reformat the external so that I can do scheduled backups with SuperDuper.

Any advice guys? I don't want to partition the drive either as one being FAT32 and the other being the Mac file system.

It's gonna be pretty hard to give you advice todd, when you've already told us you don't want to do anything except leave the drive just like it is.....

You do want to use the drive, right?

The question is not one of how you want to format the drive.
The question is what work do you want to be able to accomplish with the drive.
Not the other way around.

Let us know what you want to do with the drive, then we can provide suggestions on how to accomplish those tasks.
Examples from what you have told us so far...
I want a fully bootable backup for my Mac.
Would like to be able to store my music and video on the drive.
Need to be able to connect it to my Win PC and backup some files from there.

Have you tried Disk Utility

Create a disk Image big enough for your back-up on your external (just done it on my FAT32 flash stick)

Mount that disk image and let Super Duper or Carbon Copy clone your set-up to that

Are you on Leopard? If you are, I don't believe SuperDuper has been updated yet.

*Moved thread to proper forum - Not just anything goes in Anything Goes*

Like Stretch says, SuperDuper! hasn't been updated for Leopard yet, Dave Nanian is still working on the code (me thinks he is adding new features, he's a prolific developer and this is taking a bit too much time...).

Not only is it not entirely compatible with Leopard yet but if you don't pay your licence and use it in demo mode, the schedule backup option is not enabled. The only backup option that will work in demo mode is the erase and copy option i.e. it deletes from the hard drive the previous backup and copies over the new one.

Carbon Copy Cloner version 3 is out - says Leopard compatible

Yes but SuperDuper! is the best there is.

In an older article, it was the only backup solution for the Mac to get a Highly recommended rating from the author. That's why I think it's worth the wait plus Dave Nanian is a hard working, dedicated and conscientious developer for the Mac.

I think it's important to encourage such fine shareware developers, they help make the Mac what it is, IMO.