Time Machine via Airport Extreme not officially supported
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.
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As we noted when the latest Airport Extreme Base Station firmware shipped, Time Machine now seems to recognize USB hard drives connected to...
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Hello to everyone,
I have two questions:
1. if I would use say 500GB HD splitted into partitions and connected to AEBS, would I be able to use one of the partitions for TM backup?
2. will I be able to connecte two separate HDD to the AEBS over the USB hub and in this case will TM be able to recongnise and use one of them? Will I be able to use another as external HDD?
Many thanks!
I have a 2 month old mac pro with leopard. Just got the airport extreme and a seagate 500 GB HD. Set it up with a direct usb connection for initial backup. Now cant seem to get the mac pro to recognize the HD thru the airport. Went thru the utility and manual setting but still nothing. Am i missing something. Help would be appreciated. thanks
Turning on the feature in the TM Update 1.0 was no mistake. It was spurred by the persistent efforts of bloggers like myself who kept reminding Apple that they promised users this, and sold AP Extreme units under this (false) pretense.
Apple must fix this though, declaring the feature as unsupported after thousands bought AP Extreme units specifically for TM (this was before Time Capsule, mind you) is simply unacceptable.
It didn't show up the first time, but after reading the posts, I changed the sharing to Airport (guest worked), plugged the drive temporarily into my laptop and verified the drive, replugged the drive into my Airport Extreme, mounted the drive, then opened the drive folder with Finder, then Time Machine worked! I started a backup last light but it hung up after about 25 % (backing up 53 gigs), I restarted and it appears to working fine now. I will repost later on the results!
April 09 2008 at 3:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyFollow up. I I backed up my MacBook's 53 gig of data and it took about 6.5 hours, unattended. Hourly backups are working fine. Has anyone done a full restore yet?
April 10 2008 at 6:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI used airdisk for my Time Machine backups, it worked seemlessly until I needed to restore because my MacBook's internal drive died.
The Time Machine file on the Airdisk got corrupted and I nearly lost everything. Had to run fsck through the terminal on the 92 gig sparsebundle image that Time Machine on the Airdisk.
I did get my stuff back, but I'm hardwired USB from now on.
I'm glad I found out now -- I have an opened AEBS which I will now return. Maybe I will buy a Time Capsule, but maybe I won't -- it seems like a terrible waste of money when I have other hard drives I already have for that purpose (which I would like to use in a network but so far have just used via USB or Firewire).
April 09 2008 at 1:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCall it Pollyanish of me but I have a feeling Apple is still working to perfect the Airdisc feature and when it finally finishes the job they will then announce official support for it. I've noticed that Apple does listen to users way more than people accuse them of but what they do not do is issue reassuring comments for the benefit of the babies out there who need hand-holding and soothing cooing sounds that tell them that Apple is working on a fix.
Maybe they've decided for brand rep/image purposes that they won't talk about fixes until the fixes actually come out.
they probably don't officially 'support' it b/c of the insane number of variables involved in running backups over a wifi setup. apple can't necessarily 'support' it when your neighbors cordless phone could wipe it out
April 09 2008 at 11:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThen it shouldn't be available.
Apple has made a name for itself as a company that makes stuff that "just works".
TM over Airdisk doesn't "just work" for many people. Yes, I can see it, but it keeps telling me that the disk must be connected before it will begin a backup. It doesn't work, and Apple support will NOT help you make it work.
That is NOT how Apple should do business.
Steve promised this feature when he first announced Leopard - he should make good on his promise.
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.
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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