As we noted when the latest Airport Extreme Base Station firmware shipped, Time Machine now seems to recognize USB hard drives connected to the AEBS as valid backup locations. Was this feature added deliberately? Well, Glenn Fleishman over at TidBITS took the trouble to ask Apple about this and he reports that they told him that this is an unsupported feature (and not much else). This is unsurprising given that Apple never made mention of the feature connected with the firmware update (though it was originally promised before Leopard shipped). Fleishman himself even speculates that it was turned on by accident.So what's the upshot? Apple is offering no support for using your AEBS this way, and so if you have a problem you're pretty much out of luck as far as they're concerned. Further, considering that there have been reports that the Airport Disk can be unreliable, it's probably not a good idea to depend on an Airport Disk and Time Machine for your only backup.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
4-09-2008 @ 8:30AM
mentalsticks said...
The fact that it did work was actually the first time that I was pleasantly surprised by a lack of greed from Apple. It figures.
(and please don't tell me that "it's not greed, it's healthy profit making like any sane company would and should do" because I don't care. )
I hate Apple Inc. as much as I love their products.
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4-09-2008 @ 8:41AM
akatsuki said...
Apple really needs to fix this soon. It is going beyond the pale to activate a feature that needs to be 100% reliable and tell people that it isn't indirectly.
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4-09-2008 @ 8:47AM
Ryan said...
So if Joe User notices that his AirPort disk can now be used for TimeMachine and turns it on and has a problem, Apple is just gonna say 'tough shit bro, you should have been following the news on TUAW or TidBITS'?
Apple has made mistake releases before, and pulled them right after release, fixed the issue, and re-released. So if this was an error then the cats already out of the bag for weeks now and they are in a position to support it.
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4-09-2008 @ 9:25AM
Dave said...
I agree. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that news of TM support on the AEBS spread like wildfire across the Internet moments after the updates were released. If it was a "mistake" the onus was on Apple to issue a press release notifying users not to rely on it as a backup source, then release another update.
4-09-2008 @ 8:48AM
ivo said...
Been using AEBS and a 750GB Seagate drive for about a month now, backing up a macbook and macbookpro and its been working great. I thought I was going to have to mount the AirDisk every time to get the backup to happen, but its been doing it on its own just as a time capsule would.
I certainly hope this feature sticks around. Seems to work very well for an unsupported feature.
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4-09-2008 @ 2:05PM
Russell said...
hi
i have the same setup - 750gb seagate in an AEBS. Bought the macbook and airport extreme from the apple shop about a week ago and was told by the sales guy that backing up to airport extreme-connected drives was fully supported.
they really should make up their mind.
works fine for me so far *touch wood*
4-09-2008 @ 9:06AM
Mitch said...
Not to threadcrap, but this news is more than a couple days old...not a surprise for TUAW lately, though.
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4-09-2008 @ 9:25AM
Dave said...
And your comment benefits the TUAW community how??
4-09-2008 @ 9:44AM
mentalsticks said...
@dave:
1. What makes you think the comment was written with the intent to benefit the TUAW community?
2. What's wrong with keeping the TUAW staff on its toes? It's true that they did ignore some important Apple stories recently. So in that sense, it IS beneficial to the TUAW community who, as a rule, like to be kept uptodate with Apple news.
4-09-2008 @ 11:30AM
Brian Allen said...
I agree that TUAW was slowed down in the number of posts over the last month.
I believe that TUAW is going through a change. The staff changes and you can see the impact on the main page by the number of posts reported on the right hand side.
I hope things improve soon.
4-09-2008 @ 9:45AM
joey said...
A test would be to perform a complete system restore from the TM backup.
Have TM make a backup right now then boot from your Leopard DVD. Under utilities select the restore from TM backup option (or whatever its called) and see if the TM disc shows up. If it does select the backup you just made and restore.
In a few hours you should be back where you last left off.
At least that way one can test if 1) The AEBS TM backup does show up when doing a system restore and 2) it actually can restore the entire system.
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4-09-2008 @ 10:32AM
Erick said...
I'd like to not have to test that, but I do know while booting off the Leopard DVD you can join a wireless network. Seems to me that it may in fact work.
You could almost guarantee that it does since Time Capsule would have to operate that same way.
4-09-2008 @ 10:00AM
Mitch said...
@Dave - First, it's an opinion - an opinion of a guy who's been reading this site for a very long time. I am far from a threadcrapper or anything of the sort.
My comment benefits the community in that I'm sure that more than a few of us have noticed the quality slowly slipping from this site. TUAW used to be the number one site for me to get the latest Mac/Apple news, and that's not the case anymore. This article about Time Machine is proof positive to affirm that opinion.
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4-10-2008 @ 12:15AM
Matt P said...
Mitch what do you consider the best site for Apple news?
4-09-2008 @ 10:01AM
LeeSchneider said...
Anyone notice that when you go into TM via AirDisk that clicking the "Restore" buttton gets you no where? I can go into old files, but am unable to click on the restore button when back in time. I'm probably just doing something wrong, but this seems curious to me.
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4-20-2008 @ 1:49PM
emil Hedaya said...
I just restored some files from a few weeks ago without any problem... other than it being slow.
4-09-2008 @ 10:08AM
Kris said...
Time Machine backups to a network volume would be much more useful. I have a NAS that is leagues more reliable than a USB drive.
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4-09-2008 @ 11:11AM
KarlW said...
Can't happen, because Time Machine relies on something called "hard links", which are a feature of the filesystem (HFS+). NFS (Network File System, used by shared drives on computers. Basically wraps around the native filesystem such as HFS+ or NTFS) doesn't support this feature, because the native system might not support it.
hard links are crucial to how Time Machine operates. Basically, all data on a disk is raw data (1s and 0s), and a bookmark to a disc location for the system to find that data. Time Machine copies these to a drive, and adds or removes bookmarks as needed. Thus, files that already exist on disk won't be backup up again (just bookmarks to the same location, TM will add a bookmark), and files that are no longer needed (no bookmarks) will be deleted.
4-09-2008 @ 11:03AM
joey said...
In reply to comment c11526096 Erick:
I should have stated that when you make a system restore you should apply it to an external (USB/Firewire) drive to see if the backup acutally works.
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4-09-2008 @ 11:36AM
QuakerProf said...
This is frustrating. I switched to Apple because it is the anti-Microsoft, and yet moves like this strike me as very reflective of the Microsoft mindset. Create a feature, but decide not to make it available because Time Capsule offers a competing process. Then, turn it on quietly to calm down the frustrated users, but then let the Time Capsule marketing people convince you not to "officially" support the feature so that they can squeeze a few more Time Capsules out of the user base.
Maybe Apple should start saying "It Just Works... Unless We Need to Sell a Competing Product!" in its advertisements. Apple users are smart people who are willing to pay for quality and design- it's frustrating to be treated like morons.
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