Time Machine has been excluding items for hours... and counting!

I have been using time capsule for several years now. But today I brought a new hard drive to use with Time Machine. It's a Western Digital My Book Network drive.
Plugged it in selected the new disk and started to back up. For hours now it has been 'Excluding items..'. It has apparently excluded over 5 million items! Why is it doing this?
I've checked the list of files to exclude and it's just set to exclude the desktop and the Downloads folder.
I don't understand why it has been excluding items so long. Nothing had been copied to the external disk yet. If anyone could help me I'd be much apreciative!
Thanks, George!

georgeShawkins wrote:
Well now I have this new hard drive
You may avoid some confusion and/or problems by not calling it that. It's a +Network Attached Storage+ (NAS) device, or +network drive.+ Yes, it contains a hard drive, but OSX handles it very differently for many purposes. You've already seen that you can't format it via Disk Utility, for example.
I'd rather not have erase the whole disk and put the wanted data back onto it.
If you can copy that 50GB elsewhere temporarily, erase the drive, then copy it back, that may be much faster and easier than deleting the Backups.backupdb folder. It contains at least several hundred thousand, perhaps over a million items, that OSX must delete one at a time. It may also have permissions or other problems.
Erasing, however, takes only a few moments.
This is why we recommend giving Time Machine its own, exclusive space. See #3 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Are you putting other things on the network drive? If so, you may have problems there, too, as Time Machine will eventually use all the empty space available to it.
Those backups will be inside a rather odd container called a +sparse bundle.+ If you're really on Leopard, as per your signature, you can limit the maximum size of the sparse bundle, per #A8 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
But since you've posted in the +Snow Leopard+ Time Machine forum, if you're on 10.6.3 or later, that won't "stick," so you may want to see if you can partition the network drive via WD's software (another thing you can't do on a network drive via +Disk Utility,+ unfortunately).

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