Time Machine external drive exclusion

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Time Machine external drive exclusion

I have two identical external usb 500 Gb drives, one for Time Machine and one for iTunes (about 190 Gb), hooked up to a Mac Mini. Time Machine is only backing up the internal drive and not the external drive with the iTunes files. When I check the Time Machine system preferences I see that the drive containing the iTunes data is excluded from backup by default. The ➖ symbol is inactive (grayed out) for this drive so I cannot remove the exclusion.

Is there something I can do to backup the external usb containing iTunes data?
Would it work if the Time Machine drive was larger?

thanks for any help you can provide

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 26, 2008 3:49 PM

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Answer 1

shekel

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Feb 3, 2008 12:47 AM in response to jfiveash

I have the same problem, did you find a fix?

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Answer 2

Jeremy P

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Feb 3, 2008 4:36 PM in response to jfiveash

It sounds like Time Machine thinks you have reserved the second disk also for Time Machine backups. A possible way to get it to change that assignment would be to go to the Change Disk pane, presumably the actual backup disk will be selected. That being so, click None. That should free up the assignments in the other pane. You could try this with different combinations of disks connected to the computer if necessary. Once you have verified that either disk could now be removed from the excluded pane you could remove the iTunes disk and then reassign the backup disk to Time Machine.

One caveat: I can't absolutely guarantee that doing this won't somehow get Time Machine starting a full backup from scratch. I believe it won't but can anyone else comment from experience of switching the disk selection to None and then back?

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Answer 3

jfiveash Author

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Feb 4, 2008 7:48 PM in response to Jeremy P

I am afraid the problem persists no matter what combination of drives I use.

To test further I plugged in an external usb drive that is a different size and it is experiencing the same problem. The "-" sign is grayed out as well so that I cannot remove it from the exclusion list. This occurs whether there are two or three drives (Time Machine drive plus 1 or plus 2) connected. None of the external drives can be removed from the exclusion list.

Switching drive to "None" only seems to update the backup and does not start a full backup from scratch.

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Answer 4

shekel

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Feb 5, 2008 3:14 AM in response to jfiveash

I got it to work. You need to ensure your external HDD are re-formatted for Mac, details are on the Lacie website and you do this in Disk Utilities.

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Answer 5

jfiveash Author

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Feb 6, 2008 5:56 PM in response to shekel

That must be it! All of these drives are FAT32 for crossplatform support. I will check Lacie website (drives are Lacie) and repost here if this does not solve the problem. Thanks for your help.

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