I am attempting to connect an external hard drive to my airport extreme and see this hard drive under time machine preferences. I used to able to do this under Leopard, but no longer under lion, even after downloading Airport utility 5.6.

i dont think its responsible. the risks have been well documented and cited in the very threads we're particpating in.

when i say dont worry about what "i do" im not referring to me singularly -- im referring to what others do. those who are all not you. but you do worry. because you have a hero complex and believe it is up to you to save others from their own ignorance & decisions. which is really kind of arrogant, if you think about it. its a problem not only in this forum but in this country itself.

its okay, really. we dont need saving.

mdelvecchio wrote:

i dont think its responsible. the risks have been well documented and cited in the very threads we're particpating in.

Unfortunately, many folks don't read all the posts in a long thread here; they often go to the last post and if it seems to have an answer, that's about as far as they read. Sometimes that gets them into trouble.

you do worry. because you have a hero complex

There's no need to try long-distance psychoanalysis. I do not have a hero complex; I've just seen far too many posts over the years by folks who've lost their only backups this way. Let's keep this about the facts, not speculation about motives or politics.

Backups are different from other areas; if you make a mistake, or take bad advice, or even do something silly, in most areas it's not a catastrophe especially if you have backups.

But if your only backups are lost, it can be awful. Again, backups done this way are damaged or lost with disturbing frequency.

All I'm saying is, if you're going to recommend something, include the risks. Then people can make informed decisions.

We've both had plenty of opportunity to be clear. Let's give it a rest.

if you really believe its only about keeping to the facts, you wouldnt include your own (personal) judgement that my post was irresponsible because people dont know how to read; despite my very post mentioning the exact risks you chose to re-iterate. so please, lay off the Good of the Nation (tm) stuff.

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.

I am really surprised to hear that the new "excuse" to block the use of an external hard drive is that the disc not sold by Apple is "unreliable". Wasn't it unsafe since 2008?

Most of us have more than one backup (al least the ones that have lost one back up hard drive).

It's all about selling more Apple products.

Ba, bad move.

Hello All

I am very new to mac's and in need of some advice regarding the same problem. I have just bought a base station and have connected an external hard drive to it using usb (but also powered) but the time machine wont work.

I bought it to be able to back up my mac wirelessly and told them in the shop that that was all i needed it for, at no point did anyone tell me this was possible and in fact they told me it would work fine.

I do not understand all the commands you all say as i am very new to mac's so i would be very grateful to anyone that could help a newbie

Thanks

You are not the first. 😟

Take it back for a refund. Ask (politely, of course) to see the manager. Tell him/her that you were badly misinformed, and the sales staff needs to know this is not supported by Apple.

For proof, ask them to see this Apple Support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4327

And/or, have them go to the Help Center on any Mac and look for the section titled Disks you can use with Time Machine.

Here's what it says:

Thanks for the information. Apple seem to sell me a lot of things that i dont need!

Is there any other need for me to use this base station? I mean what other benefits could it give me if i was a bit more "in the know" with my mac?

So far my experience of using a mac is not going well 😢

trudes1971 wrote:

Thanks for the information. Apple seem to sell me a lot of things that i dont need!

PLEASE take it back, so they'll quit telling other folks that.

Is there any other need for me to use this base station? I mean what other benefits could it give me if i was a bit more "in the know" with my mac?

It is a very good wireless router, so (assuming you have a laptop) you can move about and still be connected to the internet, as long as you're "in range."

You can connect your disk drive to it, and put files on it, but that may be kind of a problem, since you can't back that drive up with Time Machine (some other apps can, though). And access is somewhat slower, so trying to edit photos will be slow.

You can connect a printer and print wirelessly.

But to back up (reliably), you need to either connect the disk directly to your Mac, or get a Time Capsule. That looks like your Airport, and includes a wireless router, but is a bit larger, as it has a built-in disk drive. It was designed specifically for wireless backups.

You should be able to apply the refund for the Airport (and disk drive, if you bought it there) to the purchase price. If you ask, they might even give you a bit of a discount for having misled you and caused an extra trip.

(If you have a desktop Mac on your network, you can back up over your network to a "shared" drive on it.)

So far my experience of using a mac is not going well 😢

Sorry about that. 😟 But PLEASE do rattle the Apple Store, so they do better by the next customers.

Here is a solution that worked for me. I don't want to revive this old post, but adding another solution.

In my case, I have Airport Extreme used only to connect USB external drives so that I can use them as shared drives on the network without connecting the drives to a specific machine and making them shareable through network (I have network sharing disabled).

On OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard I was able to access external USB disk. I added a 10.9.3 machine and things changed, I wasn't able to connect, the "Connect to" button didn't work and the Finder was showing "connecting..." but never managed to connect.

I turned out the reason it didn't work is 10.9 doesn't like if the Airport name containts special characters and caps. You can still name your wireless network as you like, but the Airport should not contain these characters.

Before:

"@ AIR Port1"

After I changed it to:

"airport1"

... everything works as expected on 10.9.

By the way I even tried using "Connect to server via SMB" and while I was able to connect to "@ AIR Port1" and show drives, finder would ask me to login into my Airport every 5 secons. It would still allow me to work with that folder but it would show login box.

So clearly, the issue was with special chars and caps. I recommend to use only small letters, maybe numbers or maybe spaces (I didn't try if spaces work).

Hope this helps.