Time Machine works with USB external HDs on Time Capsule

Over at Macworld, Glenn Fleishman has an initial hands-on report about Apple's new Time Capsule combination Airport Base Station and NAS, and he's confirmed something folks were wondering about: "you can also perform Time Machine backups to drives attached to the Time Capsule via USB." This is interesting, because Apple originally said that Time Machine backups would be possible to an AirDisk (that is, an USB external drive on the regular AirPort Extreme Base Station).
Just before Leopard shipped, that feature quietly disappeared, leaving some early-adopters who had counted on that capability in the lurch. The obvious questions now are whether there's any technical reason why Time Machine to AirDisk wouldn't work on the AEBS, and whether Apple is holding the feature back just to promote the Time Capsule. In any case, it's good to know that if you get a Time Capsule you're not limited to the internal storage, perhaps making the smaller 500GB model that much more attractive.
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Over at Macworld, Glenn Fleishman has an initial hands-on report about Apple's new Time Capsule combination Airport Base Station and NAS,...
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I thought Daniel Eran Dilger did an excellent article on why Time Machine IS NOT SUPPORTED on Airport Extreme.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/11/08/why-leopards-time-machine-doesnt-support-airport-disks/
@Maraklov: Which one do you have in bridged mode, the Linksys or the Airport? I'm asking as I was wondering if you can still use USB attached printers and HD's etc. if the airport is in bridged mode. I tried to put an Airport extreme into bridged mode, but afterwards I couldn't use the Airport utility so I thought it might be difficult to use other features..
March 03 2008 at 6:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyGasp, Apple doing something to handicap it's users to make an extra buck? What is this world coming to? :-)
- Happily typed on my macbook.
Does anyone else experience horrible stability issues with Airdisk and their AEs? It appears that if my computer goes to sleep, I lose the Airdisk connection. Understandable, but I have to restart the AE in order to get it back. I don't think I am the only one with this issue judging from the Apple support forums...
March 03 2008 at 12:57 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAir Disk, in my experience, on an AEBS with any version of the firmware, more or less stinks. It works OK for transferring small files but try and transfer anything large and the connection will drop such that you need to reboot the router (at least with an Iomega MiniMax attached to it). In addition to this I found that transferring large quantities of data would also cause the WAN port on the unit to become inaccessible (i.e. no access to the Internet) until hours after the data transfer has been completed or (you guessed it) the router is rebooted.
I still live in hope that Apple will fix this but it's been over a year now and, honestly, that hope has pretty much dwindled now that Time Capsule has been released.
and visa versa your playstation3 harddrive would become your secondary backup hardrive and so you could just drag your media files straight to it.
March 02 2008 at 6:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI hi, I just had an interesting thought. Can time capsule be formatted in fat32? Because I just read ps3 can read fat32 drives via usb......soooo you can basically have access to your whole mac hardrive on your tv via ps3 ....any thoughts?
March 02 2008 at 6:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhat is the software version on a Time Capsule? My AirPort Extreme shows 7.2.1. Perhaps the glitch with the buffer is fixed in the Time Capsule's shipped firmware? Maybe an Update is coming for us AirPort owners.
March 02 2008 at 4:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyTime Capsule's firmware is 7.3.
I'm in the same boat.. c'mon Apple, do the right thing here.
Here are couple of issues I see with Time Machine and/or Time Capsule:
1: Let's say you're into either digital photography or digital videography, to the point where you have gigabytes of files stored on a hard drive, and you don't want to use Time Machine to back those digital images up. How do you tell Time Machine to "skip" those items, yet back up other non-image items on your hard drive?
2: I understand that this Time Machine technology works best over an 802.11n WiFi network. And isn't it true that any 802.11b or g device on the network will negate the speed advantages of the n? Does that mean it's time to throw away all computers and Airport devices older than a year old, including all Airport Expresses?
3: How hard is it to replace a hard drive in one of these Time Capsule devices? If you wanted to do that some time down the road, would it be possible?
itimemachine allows you to backup to any network drive.
I have been using it for months now without any issues.
http://www.xiotios.com/itimemachine.html
From the site: "Use at your own risk. There are still some bugs when using Time Machine over the network."
I wish I had bookmarked the original thread here saying it was unreliable. A backup solution can't have bugs. It must work all the time. Backup solutions aren't toys. Time machine with one hard drive is safe, so long as you don't turn on Filevault which is incompatible, are running a patched copy of Aperature (if that's something you use). Time machine with multiple hard drives, according to contacts at Rush Limbaugh can be buggy.
--Sam
--Sam
I just tried iTimeMachine on my 10.5.2 machine. It allows me to select a share on my NAS as a Time Machine destination, but Time Machine is unable to create the sparse image file.
March 02 2008 at 3:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAs soon as I can connect a hard drive t my AEBS I'm getting a Drobo. The Time Capsule just isn't safe enough. Only one drive?!
March 02 2008 at 12:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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