[Leica] Looking For Simple, Automated, Cross-Platform Back Up Solution....

[robertbaron1 at gmail.com (Robert Baron)]

....if there is such a thing.

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
Apple's built-in Time Machine or other similar third party back up
software.  (The iMac has Snow Leopard OS, I can upgrade it to Lion at
no dollar cost but am waiting a little bit longer to be sure of it.)

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  Lightroom (now v3.4.1) and I plan to stick
with it.  In the PC I had three  internal hard drives, one for
programs and 2  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 (formatted
Mac OS)  but keep the image files on the  external hard drive and
access them as needed.  So far, so good.

I'd like to keep the image files on the external FAT32 disk in case I
need to access them from a PC running Windows.  I know I can manually
drag and drop them them from the external drive where they permanently
reside to a backup drive but since there are a lot of them it would be
a long process of copying whereas I would ideally prefer to have
software that will just add new files or changes to the backup.

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 (preferably automated) back up routine for both
internal and external drives will be  most appreciated.

--Bob