How to wirelessly connect Time Machine? (Seagate GoFlex + 5G Router)

A Backup Drive should share the smallest possible amount of hardware with your primary storage as possible. Otherwise when your primary drive dies, both the original and the copy die together.

You can use an external USB drive. Time Machine does not need speed to do its work. 2 to 3x the size of what you need to back up is recommended.

There is no practical way to do wireless backups (without another computer) except to a Time Capsule, and your files will soon be too big for that.

I have never seen TimeMachine work reliably with a hard drive attached to a wireless base station. I’ve use TimeCapsule reliably. I’ve backed up over WiFi to an OS X server using TimeMachine reliably. I use a dedicated NAS at home and even though it officially supports TimeMachine backups there are caveats that have kept me from trying to use it for that. Bottom line: use an attached hard drive or a TimeCapsule for the greatest safety and convenience.

Having said that, I find TimeCapsule to be a royal pain when it comes to restoring an entire hard drive. If I need to restore a file or two, WiFi is plenty fast. But to restore the entire system can take 24+ hours via WiFi - and that assumes it doesn’t stall in the middle of the process. That means moving the TC and computer in close proximity so you can connect them with a cable. Umm, that defeats the whole idea of wireless and in my case means taking the system down because I have a centralized wire closet that is great for everyday use but doesn’t have room for a computer.

I urge users to dedicate a hard drive to backups only. In fact, I urge them to keep 2 drives dedicated to backups. If you partition a hard drive and use it partially for data and partially for backups, where is the data being backed up to? Oh, the backup partition, right. So if the drive dies you’ve lost your original and backup. Not good.