Do you have things on the external that precludes you formatting it? You aren’t doing it too often, so a tarball might work, but you’ll be wasting a lot of time doing it that way. Then again, if it’s once a month, that doesn’t seem like a huge deal. I just use rsync
now and then for my external backup and it doesn’t take long at all.
I’m going to go with you being crazy. Although based on your mention of “deja vu” and the number “4”, I did see djview4. I don’t think that’s what you wanted though.