how to format a drive for backup

Disk Utility in Applications -> Utilities lets you format the drive for backing up, as well as installing a bootable system.

Solid State drives in Mac OS X 10.13 or later automatically are formatted APFS when installing a new operating system.

HFS Extended Journalled in GUID is the basic formatting that Macs use if you want to be able to backup and maintain the resource forks of files on a Mac, as well as make it bootable on any system running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.

If you need to be able to connect the drive to a PC, there are a variety of file transfer and screen sharing tools we can discuss depending on what the PC is running that you can share data over a network while maintaining full Macintosh compatibility.

ExFAT, FAT32 offer PC read/write access but no Mac support for resource forks, or Macintosh applications that aren't archived first in their own zip file format on the Mac.

NTFS requires third party tools for writing from the Mac if directly attached to the Mac, though Macs can read the drives formatted this way.

For more details see this tip:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3003

By the way, your username is not going to attract many answers, and you may want to be a little less blatant about your dislike of the platform. You are on an Apple owned and moderated board. I try to be impartial, and help everyone.