Can't find hard drive shared using Airport Extreme

Hello Sharpi. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

First, is the external hard drive formatted in NTFS? If so, the AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBS) will not be able to "see" it in order to share it.

If it is NOT formatted in NTFS, but HFS+ or FAT16/32, verify that the AirPort Utility recognizes the drive. That is, it should show up on the Disks panel within the AirPort Utility when in the Manual Setup mode. Does it?

I have the same problem and am interested in getting mine correct. I will check and get back to you for additional help. Thanks.

I am having a similar problem, however mine shows up in the shared folder but Time Machine does not recognize the drive what so ever if it is plugged into the AirPort. I want to back up over the network. Is there a way to get Time Machine to recognize the drive?

Sorry, but no. Time Machine will only backup your Macs internal hard disk or any external hard disks physically attached to the Mac. Time Machine can not backup one remote device to another remote device.

Tesserax,

My external hard drive is showing on the Disks panel within Airport Extreme. Is there anything that has to be done to use it? In Finder, it is shown under the Shared folder.

Time Machine can only backup the internal drive on your MacBook or an external drive attached to your Mac. It cannot backup network drives ... like the one attached to the AirPort Extreme. Sorry!

Tesserax

I 'think' you may be misunderstanding the question. It seems the question is "Does Time Machine support the ability to backup a MacBook's internal drive to an external drive that is connected to the AirPort Extreme thru the USB as a networked drive?"

I would like the answer to this question as well as I have found information on the internet that says this is not officially supported by Apple but some folks have been able to get it to work since a firmware upgrade in 2008. I recently bought an AirPort Extreme and a portable Seagate FreeAgent Pro disk. I have set up my AirPort Extreme and connected the Seagate drive thru the USB and my MackBook and Time Machine find the drive and write backups to it with no problems so far.

This set up was suggested to me by an Apple Store employee when I was shopping for my AirPort Extreme and that same employee seemed to indicate that this was how they actually performed their backups at the Apple Store, so obviosuly I was surprised to find information online that states it is not officially supported.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

Any clarification would be helpful...thanks!

Hello thepescador. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

I 'think' you may be misunderstanding the question. It seems the question is "Does Time Machine support the ability to backup a MacBook's internal drive to an external drive that is connected to the AirPort Extreme thru the USB as a networked drive?"

That is always possible as we actually have a number of topics going on which are only somewhat related to the question posed by the OP. 😉

However, the answer to your quoted question is no ... at least Apple doesn't support it.

Even referring to your reference: " Time Machine can’t back up to an external disk connected to an AirPort Extreme, or to an iPod, iDisk, or disk formatted for Windows."

In addition, Apple clearly calls this out in the following Support article: Time Machine doesn't back up to AirPort Extreme AirPort Disks

Although some folks have been successful in performing Time Machine backups to AirPort disk ... most experience some form of corruption of data over time. I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a sound backup strategy, especially if you are backing up critical data.

thepescador wrote:
. . .
This set up was suggested to me by an Apple Store employee when I was shopping for my AirPort Extreme and that same employee seemed to indicate that this was how they actually performed their backups at the Apple Store, so obviosuly I was surprised to find information online that states it is not officially supported.

Yes, unfortunately we've had a number of reports of similar statements by folks at the Apple stores.

As Tesserax says, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's probably why Apple doesn't support it. See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

In my case, it worked flawlessly for about 3 months, then every couple of days the backups would come up corrupted. Once, +Disk Utility+ was able to fix it; another time, +Disk Warrior+ could. The other times, the only solution was to erase and start over. Since then, it's worked well, although very slowly on occasion. And that's all with exactly the same hardware, in exactly the same locations. (And the disk is a Seagate Free Agent Pro, too.)

This forum, and the Time Machine forums, have any number of similar reports.

I'd strongly suggest you either:

• Return the Airport (and perhaps the disk) to the store. Insist on a full refund because of bad advice, and refer them to the Apple article.
  
• Take your chances, but by all means keep some sort of secondary backups. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum), for some recommendations.

My external HD is HSF+ journaled but still isn't showing up under the airport utility/discs. I realize I can't use it for a time machine back up attached this way, but just want to have a storage point there. Has anyone got a solution for this? I'll clear it and reformat if I have to but only if it's going to work!

Your Airport should appear in the Shared section of your Finder sidebar. If it doesn't, select Finder > Preferences > Sidebar from the menubar. Be sure the little box for Connected Servers (or Bonjour Computers) is checked. Click your Airport name in the sidebar. 

If you don't use the Finder this way, click on your desktop so you get a Finder menubar, then click Go > Connect to Server, then the Browse button. That should bring up a Finder window listing your Airport; double-click it to open it.

Either way, you should now have a Finder window listing the partition(s) on the USB disk. Double-click the one you want to use. you should see a "connecting to server" message briefly, then an empty Finder window for the partition.

ahh - thanks - the little box Finders/Preferences/Ext Drives wasn't checked. It's showing now - yay.

I have the finder preferences boxes checked under shared but this still does not help. The external disks does show up in airport utility, but not in the finder sidebar. Any suggestions? I tried restarting airport but that didn't help.

I have the same problem - external hard drive is recognized in Airport Utility, external drive box is checked in Finder, but I don't even get the "Shared" column in the left-hand window of Finder, much less can I see the drive. What am I doing wrong?

A little twist to the same problem 🙂
My Ext.HD(connected through a USB to TC) IS showing AND working perfectly ON MY MacBook, however, trying to get my WinXP computer (in which I´m going to use as a mediacenter) to locate the ext. drive was not that easy..

Anybody know why, and would like to tell me? 🙂

My computer is wired to TC (LAN-cable/TP-cable) and the ext. disk is FAT32 formatted..

Thanks from the country in the world that probably sells the most iPhones if you consider no of inhabitants 🙂