Time Machine with AirPort Extreme?

In your first post in this thread, your only caveat was that you "have not tried doing a full restore off it."

That's a neutral statement; not positive, not negative. No mention of risk at all.

Now, please, let's drop this.

because the risks have already been stated in these very threads, as ive mentioned. i dont think anyone has contested or suggested otherwise.

Has anyone any idea as to why Apple announced that USB disks could be used for backup via Airport Extreme, then pulled the feature and then decided to reinstate it?

http://www.macworld.com/article/1132613/airporttime.html

I realise that even after making this feature available via both Airport Extreme driver updates and, curiously, updates to Time Machine to allow it too, that Apple still don't suggest this use as reccommended for TM backups. I was wondering if anyone knows why. Saying that "After some years it can corrupt" sounds rather like the potential problem of using any hard disk for backups over time, or come to that, even files on the built-in disk can get corrupted. In fact I had a lengthy discussion with Apple support one time over the fact that TM was completely ignoring some folders when backing up using TM on a disk connected directly to my iMac!

Just curious ...

KiltedGreen wrote:

Has anyone any idea as to why Apple announced that USB disks could be used for backup via Airport Extreme, then pulled the feature and then decided to reinstate it?

http://www.macworld.com/article/1132613/airporttime.html

Read the article again, please. It's not an Apple article, much less an announcement. It's speculation about the reason for a mostly mundane update. Follow the links to the actual Apple article; you'll only find things like "This update includes general fixes and compatibility updates."

Apple's original intent was for it to work and be supported; Time Machine was introduced with Leopard, and the Leopard pre-release announcement did say it would work, and it was beta-tested (with mixed results). But when Leopard was actually released, all that was removed, and you couldn't select that configuration. Subsequently, the update mentioned in the article allowed it, probably to allow 3rd-party NAS drives that follow Apple's AFP requirements to be used.

Speculation was, Apple would fix the problems and announce support. When that didn't happen, speculation was that a new version of the Airport Extreme would appear, with support for TM backups. Neither has happened in the 5 years since Time Machine has been released.

The fact is, it's usually unreliable.

Interestingly, the Setup Guide for the new 802.11ac AirPort Extreme specifically calls out support for Time Machine using a USB drive connected to the AirPort. On page 13:

I'm not sure why you're dredging up a year-old thread.

Yes, the new "ac" models introduced last month apparently support it.

The older ones do not.

Neither the Help nor several support articles, even those recently-updated, have been updated to reflect the difference.