Time Machine will NOT work with Airport Disks!

Are you using Leopard final or a dev build?

I'm interested because it's worked for me (not on an AEBS AirDisk, but on a linux mounted network drive).

as like what seems like the rest of you, i bought an APE for TM. as soon as i saw jobs talking about using an APE and HDD for time machine i planned on buying, one and got one a few months ago.

on the other hand. i could be totally wrong but the time machine page mentions using a different mac as the TM backup location. assuming time machine doesnt work for airdisks. wouldnt it be possible to configure the HDD to be considered a different mac?

this doesnt seem like something they would drop in the long run if at all.

Wow, I actually forgot about the home on ipod feature. And I personally didn't buy the airport for airport disk, I bought it because it's a cheap and good 802.11n router. I still love airport disk, love the management system, love NAT-PNP (even thought it doesn't seem to work with multiple computers with Lighthouse, I guess it's not de-registering forwards properly), but I will be upset if I can't backup to it. Yeah, I do understand that it may be incredibly slow the first time, but with wireless N on the new notebooks that shouldn't be a problem.

Dammit, Apple. I may have to buy an xsan with my $23k of AAPL profits to run time machine! >:(

(P.S. Thanks SPJ for the riches)

I'm running from the retail release, shipped to me this very morning. This is going to make a LOT of folks angry. An explanation would be nice.

Add me to the list of people nervously waiting for tomorrow. The AirPort Extreme (802.11n) base arrived today. Fingers crossed!

The following discussion with an Apple rep has been found in the web:
http://img292.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aebstimemachinechatwr9.png

Even if the feature does work, it would be painful to do the initial backup over Wireless. For me it would be interesting whether it is possible to do this first backup with the USB disk directly attached and then attach it to the airport station.
Best, Confidemus

""The following discussion with an Apple rep has been found in the web:
http://img292.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aebstimemachinechatwr9.png"""

I read that...thanks for posting...I'm encouraged, but think the the person who was asking the questions may have been talking to an ELIZA program.

I'm going to buy lepord and try it. I wasn't going to upgrade to lepord, but if I can get the time machine feature to work, it would be helpful. I have 2 Mac Mini's, 2 powerbooks, 1 xserve, 3 extreme routers, and 1.2 tera usable on a RAID attached storage device connected to one of the extreme's. If could setup 5 partitions and let time machine do the backups that would work for me.

Fernando Schlottmann wrote:
Even if the feature does work, it would be painful to do the initial backup over Wireless. For me it would be interesting whether it is possible to do this first backup with the USB disk directly attached and then attach it to the airport station.
Best, Confidemus

you could always enable the "Share disks over Ethernet WAN port" in the Airport Utility setup, then connect the Airport disk to your Mac via Ethernet for the initial backup. the drive would appear the same from your Mac whether connected via Ethernet or wireless, so I'd guess that Time Machine shouldn't care. Maybe mounted locally would work too?

Mind you, either way, from what I've seen with my AEX, write speeds to an airport disk connected either way are very slow.

I too am interested to see if Time Machine will work with an Airport Disk to back up several machines on the network, it sounds good in theory. but in practice it may make more sense to have the disk mounted via Firewire one of your Macs on the network and share it from there? Firewire shared disk write speeds over the network I've measured are significantly faster (e.g. 15-20x) vs what I've seen on a USB disk connected to my AEX. OTOH, once the initial backup is made by Time Machine, perhaps the subsequent ones would be fine even over the slow Airport disk.
I guess we'll find out soon enough when we get Leopard in our hands (got a big new hard disk on the way...)

Brett C wrote:
you could always enable the "Share disks over Ethernet WAN port" in the Airport Utility setup

You do not have to enable that for your disk(s) to show up on the LAN ports. You only enable that if you want someone from outside your network to connect to the disk(s).

e.g. if you have a typical home network where your AEBS is connected to a cable/DSL modem, checking that box will allow users outside your home to connect to your disk. Granted they will have to know the IP address given to you by your ISP, but unless you really need it, that option is best left turned off.

I guess I wait for a new AE

I'm in the same boat: I bought an Airport Extreme and new external drive for the sole purpose of wireless Time Machine backup. My old wireless router and desktop external were fine. I'm out several hundred bucks and a weekend rewiring everything. SO annoyed.

Isn't this beyond false advertising? I'm feeling lied to and tricked.

I'm doing some tests now.

I can connect to my Airport connected disks in Finder ok, but they don't appear as usable volumes in Time Machine.

I then plugged my Time Machine disk in direct to my iMac via USB and it started backing up - I ejected it, plugged it back into the AEBS and Time Machine then carried on backup up. However AEBS connected disks seem extremely unreliable under Leopard - they continually disconnect and the only way to get them back is to reboot the AEBS.

This really needs fixing soon.

I'm now doing a full backup with Time Machine onto the disk via USB, then will move it back to the AEBS and see what happens!

More when I have it - and yes this is on the released version of Leopard.