What's wrong?
De acordo com man 5 crontab
:
«…
The "sixth" field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the cronfile. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input.
… », você simplesmente escreveu errado. Então, para crontab, deve ser escrito como
date +"\%Y-\%m-\%d__\%H.\%M.\%S"