Q: Using a USB disk with AirPort after transferring file to it.
Hi All
I have listed this question here as it stumped me for a while and I could not find an answer on the web. It may have been my bad use of search terms but I thought I would post how I solved the problem. The issue was I wanted to transfer files to a harddrive over USB BEFORE using it on an airport extreme, but when I did this I could not see them when I plugged the hardrive in to the airport extreme. However after a frustrating few days I found a solution, which is as follows
1) format the drive in standard Mac OS journaled format (NOT ENCRYPTED THOUGH!)
2) plug it in to the Airport base station FIRST
3) Connect to the drive over WIFI and ensure that it lists two 'sharepoints' which should be AirPort and the User name you used to format the harddrive. If this ihas gone to plan you can now eject the drive and remove it from the USB slot of the Airport base station
4) Connect the drive to your Mac (or PC but this will need to have a different format so check the web for a compatible format) and once mounted you should see two folders on the drive. These should match the drives that matched the ones that showed up when connecting over the Airport
5) Now copy the files into one of these two folders. I am assuming at this point that the folder with the user name will need the password connected to that account to access while the one nameed Airport will be availble to all users. Hence be mindful what files you are copying where, unless you don't mind people seeing private files such as bank statements (so I guess you were not in the Panama files in that case!:)
6) Once copied to the drive you can eject and reconnect to the Airport, and you should be able to access them wirelessly.
Its a bit of a faff but probably quicker than trying to copy a lot of files or large ones to the drive when it is connected to the Airport base station as currently the ports on it are USB 2.9 and so limited to the 400mbit speed of that port rather than the 1.3 Gbit (on a good day!) for Wifi N!
Hope this was helpful
Cheers
Spencer
Airport Extreme current version
Posted on Apr 9, 2016 8:29 AM