Warning:  Don't use Time Machine to backup disk containing existing TM backup files

I ran into a problem while starting a clean TM backup on a new hard drive.  I found the solution on this board and wanted to do a clean post of it in case it might help someone else.
A few months ago, I had got a new external to put my Aperture referenced masters on.  When I first hooked up the drive, IIRC, I got a message from Time Machine asking me if I wanted to use that drive as a TM backup drive.  I didn't have a proper backup plan in place so I said "Sure why not" and never thought any more about it.  So that drive contained the TM backups as well as a lot of Aperture files.
Fast forward to now when I decide to do a proper backup plan including a new drive just for TM.  So last night, I hook up this new drive and tell TM to use it to backup my iMac as well as that previous external.  But I specify in the preferences that I want to exclude the old Backups.backupdb folder of course.  Great.  I go to bed expecting to find everything backed up the next morning.
Uhhhh... not!  This morning, the TM preference window is still spinning on "Excluding items" and it is currently at 35 millions!  (That millions with an "m").  ???  So I did a search on this board and found this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2520870?start=15&tstart=0
in which another user had a similar problem and, after fishing around a bit, Pondini discovered that this old Backups.backupdb folder was the source of the problem.
So I stopped TM, and this time I told it to exclude the whole original external drive. TM immediately started doing a proper backup which only took a few hours.
The one thing I wanted to point out is that even though Pondini suggested Excluding the old Backup.db folder, this apparently is not enough.  Because when you do that, it wants to go in there and exclude every little file one by one and for god knows what reason, there is a huge number of these buggers.
So it looks like if you have an external that contains an old TM backup, you have to copy the other files (the ones you want to keep) somewhere else, erase the drive and put those files back on it before you can do a TM backup of it.
Thank you to Pondini once again for his invaluable help.
Bo

Thanks for your reply V.K. much appreciated.
I have gone into the options and I can see my external drives there, but for some reason I can't remove them from the exclusion list. I can add and remove the Laptop HD from this list, but for some reason the "-" button becomes disabled whenever I select the external Hard Drives.
Is there a reason for this? I've been using both drives for a while, so they are both Mac formatted.
Thanks again.

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