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Time Machine will NOT work with Airport Disks!

It looks like Time Machine will not work with Airport Disks after all. All references to Airport have been removed from the Time Machine page:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

It also specifically says: "You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices."
Surely, they would have included the Airport Extreme Base Station in this list if it was supported.

I really hope there will be another firmware update for the AEBS which will bring compatibility with Time Machine, because Time Machine was the only reason for me to buy an AEBS. (I only use it as a small backup server, I don't even have wireless networking enabled. There were other solutions, e.g. from Synology, which are faster and more reliable than AEBS disk sharing, but Synology stated their network drives would not be compatible with Time Machine.)

Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Oct 16, 2007 8:38 AM

Reply
27 replies

Oct 16, 2007 8:44 AM in response to HelgeG

On Apple's UK site you can still find the old description of Time Machine for comparison:

http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/leopard/features/timemachine.html

"Effortless meets wireless.
With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine."

Oct 17, 2007 3:00 AM in response to freejack

Just checked Google cache:

With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.

I'd guess that they've found some issues with it in beta testing and have pulled it for now. With any luck it will be updated (either OS or Base Station) to work again, especially as I've just bought one of these from eBay for this exact purpose. *sad panda*

Oct 23, 2007 1:27 AM in response to HelgeG

Ouch! I just purchased and installed and AirPort Express Gigabit expressly for the purpose of having network attached storage that I could backup my iMac and my wife's PowerBook to using Time Machine. A few days ago this was a feature I found Apple was goign to support and now it's gone?
I'm very dissapointed.

Oct 23, 2007 7:38 AM in response to HelgeG

Support for AirDisk and TimeMachine are the 2 primary reasons I purchased an AirPort Extreme months ago. The AirDisk performance has been dismal and all but unusable - so I have my doubts regarding being able to use the base station with Time Machine. We'll see when Leopard is released, but I'm not holding my breath. AirDisk has been the worst product/feature experience I've ever had from Apple. It's a shame, because usually everything "Just Works."

Oct 24, 2007 2:00 PM in response to HelgeG

Craptastic. Sign me up as another person who bought an AirPort Extreme Base Station on the premise that Time Machine could back up to it.

After all, that's what Apple told us we could do.

I dearly hope this is just a case of a minor software update to Leopard or a firmware update to the AEBS. Who knows, maybe an intern just got a little happy with the copy editing.

Oct 24, 2007 4:10 PM in response to HelgeG

Here's how you can potentially use your AirDisk with TimeMachine (beware that YMMV), but it should work as it works with every other "unsupported" device.

1) Mount your AirDisk so it appears on your Mac
2) Open Terminal.app
3) change directories to the AirDisk's root folder located in "/Volumes"
ie: cd "/Volumes/AirDisk Name"
4) execute this command to "bless" the drive to be used with time machine:
touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported
5) Start TimeMachine and if all went well, it should recognize your AirDisk drive and use it for TM.

This should also work on NFS shares, SMB shares, AFP shares, basically anything. It has worked up until the last developer seed, so unless they yanked this at the last minute, it should still work.

Now, the reason why Apple removed this feature may be due to the unreliability of the AirDisk, so be cautious.

Time Machine will NOT work with Airport Disks!

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