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Q: New Airport Extremes any more reliable for wifi backups?

I was one of the many folks who spend hours configuring and reconfiguring my network a few years back trying to get Time Machine to play nice with my USB hard drive for the sole purpose of daily automatic time machine backups over WiFi.  Something about Apple not technically supporting this practice, but that it *could* work, *sometimes*, *for some people*.  In my experience I could get it working for a matter of days at a time before the link would break and my backups would become inaccessible by either wifi or by direct USB connection, forcing me to re backup my entire HD each time it happened, until I eventually gave up on it all together.

 

Fast forward to today, I still hate having to go through the process of finding my hard drive, plugging into power, finding a USB cable, etc etc etc every time I want to make sure my backups are up to date.  Thus, it gets done very infrequently and therefore makes my backups far less useful if I should ever need them.

 

As luck would have it, over the holidays I acquired the NEW Airport Extreme w/ 802.11n... have these issues been fixed?

 

All I want is a reliable, daily, automatic time machine backup, OVER wifi, THROUGH the new airport, TO my USB connected Phantom drive.  Can it be???

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Jan 18, 2014 7:23 AM

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Q: New Airport Extremes any more reliable for wifi backups?

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  • by Bob Timmons,

    Bob Timmons Bob Timmons Jan 18, 2014 8:18 AM in response to Summit
    Level 10 (105,203 points)
    Wireless
    Jan 18, 2014 8:18 AM in response to Summit

    As luck would have it, over the holidays I acquired the NEW Airport Extreme w/ 802.11n... have these issues been fixed?

    Apple now officially supports Time Machine backups to a hard drive at the USB port of the "new" AirPort Extreme.

     

    See this Apple support document for confirmation. Look down near the bottom of th document for the pertinent info.

     

    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5924?viewlocale=en_US

     

    All I want is a reliable, daily, automatic time machine backup, OVER wifi, THROUGH the new airport, TO my USB connected Phantom drive.  Can it be???

    "Wireless" and "reliable" are two words that really do not go together well, but your chances have improved with the new AirPort Extreme.