Hi

I'm trying to get time machine to recognize the drive. It can't see the external NTFS drive. However I can see, inside the tuxera preference, that my external NTFS drive is mounted.

is there something missing?

Time Machine only supports HFS+ volumes, so that is why you can't use it. It's not wise to use NTFS for mac only stuff anway as the permissions and ALCS don't translate 100%.

There is no way that you can use NTFS with time machine. Time Machine may be able to backup a HDD formatted as NTFS using Time Machine, but you can't use a NTFS as a Time Machine drive. Stick with HFS+ for this.

Yes, you can do it. Time Machine works on HFS+, but it also works on sparsebundle disk-images. That's how it works with networks drives.

I wrote detailed steps at http://www.cafe-encounter.net/p1847/use-a-windows-ntfs-or-linux-or-other-formatted-disk-for-apple-time-machine-backups but if you've already installed Tuxera then in outline it goes like this:

* Create a sparsebundle disk image
* Create a Time Machine preferences file inside the sparsebundle which contains the UUID of your machine
* Copy the sparsebundle to your disk
* Mount it
* Tell Time Machine to use it.

The first two steps are the difficult ones, but it only takes a couple of minutes to do.