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Time Machine

Ok, before somebody gets reply happy. Please only reply IF you have actually tried this.

I really want to get Time Machine to work with Leopard over my Airport Extreme N. I have somewhat tested this, and it seems to work, but I am hoping to get confirmations.

I have been reading that:
1. Plug your External HD into your Mac via USB
2. Setup Time Machine as normal, but do not do the initial backup
3. Unplug the external HD from the Mac
4. Plug the external HD into the AEBS
5. Mount the External HD from the AEBS
6. Perform the initial backup through Time Machine and everything should work wirelessly.

Is this indeed correct? And any major issues by doing this? I was able to get to step 6 on the Macs at work, but the initial backup was so slow, I did not have time to complete the initial backup. I am hoping somewhere out there somebody has done it.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Oct 30, 2007 11:52 PM

18 replies

Nov 4, 2007 3:29 PM in response to Steven Kutoroff

Another thing to consider is the "Restore from Time Machine" functionality on the Leopard install disk.

I got Time Machine working great with an iSCSI disk from an Openfiler Virtual Machine running on another box with lots of disk space. Over gigE, throughput was like 30-40 MB/s and all seemed happy.

Then, I though to test the bare metal restore function -- and, of course, there is no iSCSI initiator functionality in the install disk, and thus way to access my disk. It looked like I could only see attached drives and (likely local Bonjour advertised) AFP shares. So, if you are using Time Machine to back up to non-supported drive, you might test to see if it's available/works in the total restore function as well, or be happy with just the file here and there restore.

blantonf

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Nov 4, 2007 10:57 PM in response to chancorey

Time Machine is working, apparently, with my AEBS, and a Western Digital My Book 500GB USB 2.0 drive. I had previously backed up two Powerbooks to this drive, via USB cable direct connect. I then plugged the drive into the AEBS and was able to get it "seen" by Time Machine.

I'm not entirely sure what is going on now, but I suspect it may have begun the backup, again, from scratch, as it's been 27 hours since the process began last night, and the progress bar is at 37.34 GB out of 89.32 GB. At this rate it will take nearly three days. So far it hasn't missed a beat though. It keeps grinding along. ("Backing up 919,307 items") If it finishes, then I'd expect the incremental backups to go pretty quickly, wouldn't you think?

I'm not going to trust this for a while, though. My main backup strategy will be to take a large HD from computer to computer, doing each in turn. And then, backing up that backup drive. I've got mac stuff since 1984 squirreled away. Pretty much everything since '84.

Dec 13, 2007 12:23 PM in response to chancorey

If Apple ever decides to support Time Machine working on an Airport Extreme connected disk will it be through an upgrade to the OS or will it require buying a new Airport Extreme? If it is the latter, I can hold off on buying the Airport Extreme. If I'm not moving big data, I don't need a faster WAP.

Time Machine