Help: Time Machine Won't Let Us Back Up External Drives

[aottke]

Thank you to anyone who can help us figure this out.

We had our laptop and all our external portable drives backing up to a Time Machine backup (two separate ones, actually). For a few reasons, we decided to delete the original time machine backups, reformat the backup drives, and start fresh.

Now, though, two of our drives cannot/will not back up. They're both on the exclusion list and are greyed out next to the backup drive itself (as though they are also backup drives or something...although this was never the case).

Does anyone know why this might be? It won't work on either backup drive.

Thanks in advance.

- Adam

 

[Fishrrman]

My suggestions:

Forget Time Machine.
Try either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper instead.
Both are free to download and try for 30 days.
SD will keep doing a "full clone" (entire drive) forever without having to register it (you do have to register to incremental backups).

Either CCC or SD will serve you well when you have that inevitable "moment of extreme need".
TM... maybe not so much.