Time Machine re-backing up unchanged files

Sometimes (no obvious pattern) TimeMachine backs up 60Gb of data during a run. Using lsof I have seen it backup an iDVD project that I have not touched in months, and files within /System/Library. In every case I checked the files had not been changed recently. Any one sen this? have a solution? found a way to determine what files get backed up during a specific run? found a TimeMachine debug option?!

Bill Dennen wrote:
Waiting for index to be ready (-911 < 0)
Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.</div>
These aren't the cause, but might indicate a problem with, or communicating with, your TM drive. Try the things in #D2 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Everything else looks normal (assuming the files in question are on the 06-0834 drive).
Since the same files are backed-up sometimes but not others, it's probably also not something corrupted (usually, corruption will cause the backup to fail, but rarely a whole folder won't get backed-up).
So we're back to your original suspicion that they weren't backed-up because they were open. Normally, an open file will be backed-up. In the case of large databases, that's often a problem, as the entire database is backed-up if only a single small change is made, often taking up a lot of time and disk space. There are a many threads here about that.
There does appear to be an extended attribute that will prevent TM from backing up a file. XCODE seems to set that on it's "build" folders, for example. Perhaps the Frontier package sets it while the files are open, and removes it when they're closed? If so, maybe there's an option somewhere to disable that?
Can you check with the Sourceforge folks about that?
Otherwise, sorry, but I'm out of ideas.

Similar Messages

How can I get my time machine to allow me to recover files again? After upgrading to OS X, the time machine still backs up the files; but, I'm not able to navigate within the time machine or select any folders or files for restore.

How can I get my time machine to allow me to recover files again?
After upgrading MBA to OS X, the time machine still backs up the files; but, I'm not able to navigate within the time machine or select any folders or files for restore.
I've searched and can not find a solution to the problem that's being encountered.

Yeap that all makes sense now.
Do you only have the current backup showing in the TM display?? Won't it fill in the rest?
Over wireless are you waiting for the indexing to finish.. ??
Previous backup may not show for a couple of hours.
Long short of it.. Mavericks version of TM is a pain.
Sometimes it is easier to completely ignore the TM backup and do the restore manually.
I have posted the details here. See if this helps.
Can't access old files on time capsule

Time Machine stopped backing up certain files

Hi, I am running OS X Server 10.5.4. (Yes, upgrade is planned)
Time Machine has been running fine, backing up everything, etc.
However, at some point, Time Machine stopped backing up certain files regularly. The affected files are all Frontier databases (frontierkernel.org). They are 'open' files, and I wonder if this is the cause. However, I know that they used to be backed up regularly, without problems. So, maybe Time Machine was updated in 10.5.4 to change this behavior?
If I quit Frontier and then reopen it, Time Machine will back up the files. So, this tells me that TM can back up open files... sometimes. But, if I let the machine run for days, TM often skips these files, even though they have been updated on disk.
I've checked and these files are not set to be excluded from TM.
Any ideas? Thanks.

Bill Dennen wrote:
Waiting for index to be ready (-911 < 0)
Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.</div>
These aren't the cause, but might indicate a problem with, or communicating with, your TM drive. Try the things in #D2 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Everything else looks normal (assuming the files in question are on the 06-0834 drive).
Since the same files are backed-up sometimes but not others, it's probably also not something corrupted (usually, corruption will cause the backup to fail, but rarely a whole folder won't get backed-up).
So we're back to your original suspicion that they weren't backed-up because they were open. Normally, an open file will be backed-up. In the case of large databases, that's often a problem, as the entire database is backed-up if only a single small change is made, often taking up a lot of time and disk space. There are a many threads here about that.
There does appear to be an extended attribute that will prevent TM from backing up a file. XCODE seems to set that on it's "build" folders, for example. Perhaps the Frontier package sets it while the files are open, and removes it when they're closed? If so, maybe there's an option somewhere to disable that?
Can you check with the Sourceforge folks about that?
Otherwise, sorry, but I'm out of ideas.

If I use Time Machine to back-up my files, can I delete files from my Mac Air?

My Macbook Air hard drive is full, and I want to move photos to an external drive. Once Time Machine has done a back-up, can I simply delete files from the Macbook Air?

If you can attach an external drive to the MacBook Air, you could move your image library to the external drive, then configure Time Machine to back up both your MacBook Air and the external drive.
This way, you would have your "originals" 'on one drive and "backups" on another drive. That is what backups are all about. If you move your images to the Time Capsule, they will be deleted sooner or later when Time Machine is looking for more backup space. In the meantime, even if you have the images on the Time Capsule....you will have no backups in the event of a problem with the Time Capsule or drive you are using for Time Machine.

Time Machine Not Backing Up New Files

Time Machine is NOT backing up my recent files.
I recently noticed that Time Machine was backing up really quickly instead of taking several minutes as usual. I checked previous backups and discovered that NONE of my recent files were backed up.
I have a very basic setup. An external usb 1 tb drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) being used as the time machine backup drive. A new i5 mac mini with OS X 10.8.4. About 200 gigs of data with one user on the internal drive.
I have followed all of the Pondini troubleshooting steps. I have restarted into safe mode to force a deep traversal. I have repaired permissions and verified all disks with Disk Utility. I have deleted time machine preferences and followed instructions as per Pondini #A4. The backup seems to run but then finishes quickly but DOES NOT BACK UP any recent files.
I have run TMUTIL COMPARE, it showed that many files needed to be backed up.
I have run TMUTIL ISEXCLUDED on some of the files that were not being backed up. It showed that they were not flagged for exclusion.
I have run a manual backup after starting up in Safe Mode, which forced a deep event scan, but then exhibited the same behaviour..
I have acquired a new external hard drive, backed up the complete main drive (using Time Machine which appeared to be successful on the first time full backup), then run a manual backup on that new drive after adding new files and had THE SAME PROBLEM.
Here's the latest console output, which is typical since I have noticed this issue. There appear to be many megabytes of new files to be backed up, but then the operation completes within seconds and no files are backed up at all.
6/23/13 7:15:16.422 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Starting manual backup
6/23/13 7:15:16.966 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Omnius/Backups.backupdb
6/23/13 7:15:17.916 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Using file event preflight for Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:20.277 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Will copy (375.1 MB) from Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:20.298 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Found 845 files (375.1 MB) needing backup
6/23/13 7:15:20.311 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: 1.91 GB required (including padding), 747.18 GB available
6/23/13 7:15:29.264 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Copied 400 files (1.4 MB) from volume Olympus.
6/23/13 7:15:29.298 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Using file event preflight for Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:29.299 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Will copy (Zero KB) from Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:29.300 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Found 5 files (Zero KB) needing backup
6/23/13 7:15:29.301 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: 1.46 GB required (including padding), 747.17 GB available
6/23/13 7:15:30.439 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Copied 140 files (33 bytes) from volume Olympus.
6/23/13 7:15:30.511 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Created new backup: 2013-06-23-071530
6/23/13 7:15:30.608 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Starting post-backup thinning
6/23/13 7:15:30.608 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
6/23/13 7:15:30.689 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Backup completed successfully.
Please help. Time Machine is currently useless as a backup solution.

Results (username obfuscated in exclusionpaths):
   -=-=-=-=-=--
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>sourcePaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/</string>
          </array>
          <key>standardExclusionPaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups</string>
                    <string>/MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/.TemporaryItems</string>
                    <string>/.Trashes</string>
                    <string>/.com.apple.backupd.mvlist.plist</string>
                    <string>/.fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/.hotfiles.btree</string>
                    <string>/Backups.backupdb</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DB</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DF</string>
                    <string>/Network/Servers</string>
                    <string>/Library/Updates</string>
                    <string>/Previous Systems</string>
                    <string>/Users/Shared/SC Info</string>
                    <string>/Users/Guest</string>
                    <string>/dev</string>
                    <string>/home</string>
                    <string>/net</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/com.apple.backupd.backupVerification</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/efw_cache</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/private/var/lib/postfix/greylist.db</string>
                    <string>/Volumes</string>
                    <string>/Network</string>
                    <string>/automount</string>
                    <string>/.vol</string>
                    <string>/tmp</string>
                    <string>/cores</string>
                    <string>/private/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/Network</string>
                    <string>/private/tftpboot</string>
                    <string>/private/var/automount</string>
                    <string>/private/var/folders</string>
                    <string>/private/var/run</string>
                    <string>/private/var/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/var/vm</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/dhcpclient</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/Library/Logs</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Extensions/Caches</string>
                    <string>/private/var/log</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/cups</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/fax</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/uucp</string>
          </array>
          <key>systemFilesExcluded</key>
          <false/>
          <key>userExclusionPaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Pictures/cam_in</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Epsilon</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Desktop</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Pictures/cam_out</string>
          </array>
</dict>
</plist>

HT201250 After Time Machine has backed up my files, can I delete my originals from my Mac and do something in Time Machine to ensure it will never automatically delete them from the backup in the future?

I'm new to using Time Machine - I'm making my first backup right now - and I have a few concerns.
So let's say my precious photos are taking up most of my Mac's hard drive space. I back them up with Time Machine on an external hard drive. After that, I want to delete my photos from my Mac because I want more space and my photos are now stored in the external hard drive. I have a few questions about that.
First, does Time Machine's backup system follow the same concept as having extra storage (so would this be a reasonable decision to make)?
Second, if it does, then could I access/open these photos from Time Machine's backup anytime I want?
Third, would I need to use the restore backup function of Time Machine every time I want to open my photos are there alternative ways of accessing my photos, like through opening directory paths to the photos?
Lastly, when the external hard drive becomes full and Time Machine wants to delete my oldest backup files, what can I do to ensure that these photos will never get deleted unless I manually do it? Like, is there a way to lock and secure these files? Or, is it like if these photos are the only copies saved in the backup, I can rest assure that Time Machine will never delete them?
Thanks

NeuroBrain wrote:
Since my new external hard drive is have a lot of space, I'm thinking of splitting it for Time Machine and external storage.
This is a common mistake and I highly advise against it.
1: TimeMachine saves states of changes and thus requires more room on the TM drive than the boot drive it's backing up.
2: Something happens to the TM drive, loss, theft, dropped, power surge, etc., you lose both backups.
3: The storage drive might become a portable need, with it being on the TM drive, now your increasing the risk to the TM backup that something could happen to it along with the storage drive, due to increased movement.
Seriously, have a read,
Most commonly used backup methods
it's ASC User Tip that saves us regulars all the trouble of having to repeat ourselves over and over again in the posts, because we tend to forget things too, or not here sometimes etc.
"Plan for the worst and the good will take care of itself" - Donald Trump

How to stop Time Machine from backing up Temp Files?

Hi folks!
I am trying to find out how to stop Time Machine from constantly backing up 'useless' temporary files accumulated from web browsing? Although I don't change or add large files to my HD, Time Machine backs up hundreds of MBs every hour. Those file amounts make sense when I consider that I browse a lot to YouTube, SoundCloud, etc to watch videos or listen to music - I just don't want them to be backed up.
Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
But even though I did this weeks ago, Time Machine stills finds large files to be backed up every hour and my only guess is that I am still missing a location where either Safari or Firefox - the two web browsers I use - store temporary files.
Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance!

oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

Time Machine not backing up system files on second hard drive

The system files are not being included in my time machine backups on my primary drive (an internal SSD) but they are for my secondary drive (an internal HDD). I want to revert the system back to a previous state because of a change I made to the Audio folder in Libraries that may have cause an issue. When I look at the backup on my backup disk, the folder isn't even included on the SSD (the drive I made changes to). Is it hidden or just left out? I checked the Time Machine preferences and there are no folders listed to be excluded.
1) Does this mean that I will not be able to do a full system restore from these Time Machine backups?
2) How can I include those files in future backups?
Thanks!
System information:
MacBook Pro Mid 2012
OS X 10.8.5 (12F45)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
240 GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD (Main Bay)
750 GB Apple HDD (Optical Bay)

I apologize, the title of this thread is misleading. I meant it to say "on primary hard drive", not "second hard drive". Sorry for any confusion.

Time machine not backing up all files

Running 10.7.5 on a mid 2010 27" iMac. I have Time Machine set up, and have a separate dedicated 1 TB hard drive just for back ups. I can see all the back ups in TM, but some files are just not there. I did several Photoshop files (large, multiple layers, etc) and the files and new folders they are in are simply not in my back up. And I checked my prefs, I have nothing excluded from the back ups. Is there a way for me to "reset" TM and start over, or is there something I'm overlooking here?

Pretty straight forward: 27iMac>Artwork>Collage>
Yesterday I created another folder there in which I have work files (Photoshop)
I have various other folders there with my work.
Wow, I just looked at the files for a church website I maintain, and one folder, which has recorded sermons, only has one file in it, from January, when I've put one file each week so there are 10 additional files. So my Mac has 11 files in this folder, the back up has one.
Here I am thinking this is all set up and I don't have to think about it anymore. But now I'm back to backing up MANUALLLY on another drive. I'm ready to give up on this and buy reliable backup software.

Time machine wont back up my files

it will stop at an irregular time saying it cant continue (cant remember the exact terminology)
anyway i think it might be to do with corrupt files
but i dont know how to find where those files are
is there a program i can use to find out whats up or could it be something else?
im using a smartdisk external hard drive through fire wire if that aids in helping me solve this
cheers
sean

ummm sorry bout this but i have no idea what your on about haha
whats the console?
i also seen that i could verify and repair the disk but when i went to verify it said that the verification had failed
should i post the log or something?
cheers
EDIT - i found out what console is, but could u still help me out with why i cant verify disk?

Time Machine stopped backing up files 2 years ago!

So... I recently tried to restore my Macbook to an earlier time and discovered that Time Machine stopped backing up my files (documents, music, photos, etc) years ago! When I select a time period (say Sept 24, 2013) the actually files included in the backup are from no later than 2010. Why did this happen? I thought Time Machine backed up everything. I did not exclude anything and it certainly backed them up at one point. I'm not sure if there is some way that I am missing to retrieve information that was "backed up" a week ago.

A backup was listed for a week ago, it's just that when I went into the files looking for what was missing (music, for example) there is nothing new since 2010. That's years worth of new files missing all the while thinking that Time Machine was backing them up. My external hard drive was connected and Time Machine was performing that backups as usual without any indication that something was going wrong. There are dozens of backup slots over that time frame that are missing the new files.

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

Time Machine doesn't notice new files.

Alright, so I have Time Machine set up with my external drive. Everything with the setup process went smoothly, and the initial backup successfully copied everything. Since then, however, Time Machine doesn't notice when new files appear. If I create a new project in Logic, for example, it will never get backed up.
Here's what I know:
-The only thing I have told Time Machine to not back up is the other partition on my external drive.
-Logic project files get stored to the default ~/Music/Logic/ directory, which is on my internal hard drive.
-Time Machine will never notice that new projects have been added, no matter how long I wait (hours, days, weeks) or if I tell Time Machine to back up now.
-Time Machine will back up the files if I format its partition and start fresh with the same configuration.
-Reviewing the Backup.log files shows that Time Machine isn't detecting any significant changes (or new files, in my case).
-Other directories are working fine, such as /Library/WebServer/Documents/
Anybody have any ideas?

According to Ars' Leopard review, Time Machine uses a new file system change notification system framework called FSEvents (which is explained quite well in the Ars article). Since FSEvents depends on the system used by Spotlight, can you tell us whether Spotlight is updating or not?
If Spotlight is up to date, the next thing to see is whether the FSEvents framework is capable of receiving updates. To do so, the fseventsd process must be running (I imagine that you should be able to see if under Activity Monitor). If it is not running, there lies the problem: you must launch it and make sure that is launches at startup.
If the fsevetsd is running and you have free disk space (the FSEvents framework stores files events on a directory .fseventsd at the root of each file system), you might want to check that the .fseventsd directory of the file system where you have your home direcotry does not have a no_log file inside telling it not to log events for that file system. If such a file does exist, deleting it should do the trick (no guarantees though, I don't have Tiger yet to test my words!). If it doesn't exist, I hope someone else can help you further along, because I am afraid that I have run out of suggestions.
Good luck.

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down eliminate

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down menu with the gear box symbol to eliminate

I cannot find this 300GB "Backup" in the Finder, only in the Storage info when I check "About This Mac".
You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
See Pondini's page for more explanation: What are Local Snapshots? http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
I have restarted my computer, but the information remains the same. How do I reclaim the use of the 300GB? Why is it showing up as "Backups" when it used to indicate "Photos"? Are my photos safe on the external drive?
You have tested the library on the external drive, and so your photos are save there.
The local TimeMachine snapshot probably now contains a backup of the moved library. Try, if connecting your Time Machine drive will reduce the size of your local Time Machine snapshots.

Can I Use Time Machine To Back Up a FAT32 Disk Containing Image Files?

New iMac User Here. I just bought a brand new but mid-2010 27" i7 iMac. Although I've used recent MacBooks when traveling I've got no experience with Time Machine or other similar third party back up software.
I moved to the iMac from a desktop PC running Windows XP Pro SP3. I use the computer(s) mainly for photo image storage and processing. My workflow is based upon Adobe Lightroom (now v3.4.1) and I plan to stick with it. In the PC I had three internal hard drives, 2 of which were dedicated to image files. They were formatted as Windows NTFS. In preparation for the switch I formatted an external drive as FAT32 and copied all the image files to it. Now with the iMac I have Lightroom installed on its internal hard drive but keep the image files on the external hard drive and access them as needed. So far, so good.
The problem arose when I tried to set up Time Machine to back up both the internal hard drive and the external external drive. It will back up the former but not the latter. It tells me it does not interact with FAT32 disks.
Any thoughts, explanations and/or solutions for establishing a simple, single back up routine for both internal and external drives will be most appreciated.

Thanks very much for the quick response. You confirm my intial suspicion, but your suggestion relies on my memory to accomplish on a regular basis (not the best of solutions) and further would be an extended disk run every night because it would not just be backing up new additions but the whole large disk, right?

Time Machine re-backing up unchanged files

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