Time Machine via Airport Extreme not officially supported

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!

I 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).

Call 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

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.