A bit of beginner advice appreciated

[Rip]

Would a Maxtor II one Touch be fine to use with SuperDuper?

It has both firewire and USB interface. Can I use the firewire to connect directly to my MBP for the initial back-up and then connect it via USB to my Time machine for scheduled back-up?

Can I then reconnect it to my MBP via firewire to restore in the event of failure?

Can I partition it so I can back-up 2 MBPs to it?

Or what else would be a better solution? I want to have the back-up drive connected to my network rather than directly to my MBP for scheduled back-ups.

TIA

[dnanian]

That's a relatively old drive, actually: you probably want to make sure, at this point, that you're using something pretty fresh. But no, you can't make a bootable backup over the network. You can make an image -- see the "Airport Disks" post at the Shirt Pocket blog for a full discussion of this exact situation.