  Indexing very large collections of strings, such as those produced by the
widespread next generation sequencing technologies, heavily relies on
multistring generalization of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT): large
requirements of in-memory approaches have stimulated recent developments on
external memory algorithms. The related problem of computing the Longest Common
Prefix (LCP) array of a set of strings is instrumental to compute the
suffix-prefix overlaps among strings, which is an essential step for many
genome assembly algorithms. In a previous paper, we presented an in-memory
divide-and-conquer method for building the BWT and LCP where we merge partial
BWTs with a forward approach to sort suffixes. In this paper, we propose an
alternative backward strategy to develop an external memory method to
simultaneously build the BWT and the LCP array on a collection of m strings of
different lengths. The algorithm over a set of strings having constant length k
has O(mkl) time and I/O volume, using O(k + m) main memory, where l is the
maximum value in the LCP array.
