I’ve got a couple of inexpensive
4T USB-3 Seagate hard drives. They come NTSF-formatted (MBR partition table) with an NTFS driver for Mac OS X, and are listed as ‘fully compatible’ with Time Machine. I wasn’t planning to use them with that format & driver for TM, but now I am wondering how these would play with the TM exclusion list. Any idea?
From what I can see now, the "exclusion list" is a combination of things you
can't include, and the things you
don't want to include. The former entries are put in there by the OS itself, and only show up while those devices are attached. (when I unplugged that FAT flash drive, it disappeared from the exclusion list)
So it should be compatible. I think those companies saying "time-machine compatible" is a gimmick. It's also USB compatible, XLS compatible, oxygen/nitrogen-atmosphere compatible, and a bunch of other "really, you don't say?" compatbilities.
After backing up and repartitioning the drive, I looked in time machine and it was again in the "exclusions" list, probably because it's a newly-discovered external drive. I was able to remove it from the exclusions list though, so it's being backed up now.
