Airport Express / External Hard Drive and Time Machine

I had an Airport Express that was being used as the main router for my home network. I had an external hard drive that was attached to it via the USB port and I was using it for Time Machine back-ups.

Sorry, but that would not be possible as the USB port on the AirPort Express base station does not support hard drives. Did you mean to say AirPort Extreme instead?

Subsequently I got rid of the Airport Express and got a NetGear wifi router to handle the duties of the Airport Express. Problem is that I cannot connect or do any back-up's with Time Machine.

For future reference, the following are the only supported destinations for Time Machine backups:

• To an external drive directly attached (by USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt) to the host Time Machine computer.
• To an external drive directly attached (by USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt) to another Mac (running OS X Leopard+ with Personal File Sharing enabled) over a network.
• To an internal drive of a Mac Server over a network.
• To an external drive directly attached (by USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt) to a Mac Server over a network.
• To a NAS device, which supports Time Machine, over a network.
• To an Xsan storage device over a network.
• To a Time Capsule's internal drive.
• To an external drive directly attached by USB to a Time Capsule over a network.
• To an external drive directly attached by USB to an 802.11ac AirPort Extreme over a network.
• For Mac laptops, to the internal drive as Time Machine local snapshots.
  • Introduced with OS X Lion
  • Uses a special virtual file system type called: mtmfs
  • /Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb

I thought I would be able to just plug the external hard drive directly into the NetGear router via its USB - I can do this but the hard drive needs to be partitioned as either GUID Partition Table or Master Boot Record

Your hard disk is likely already partitioned one or the other of these methods.. by default it has to have some partition and those are two predominately used. Plug the USB drive into the Mac and open disk utility.. you will see what the partition scheme is.

What model is the Netgear router.. and does it support Time Machine?

I would be very careful of non-apple gear that is claimed to support TM as you often find it is based on a very complicated setup. The drive is not actually formatted HFS because the router cannot read it.. and only the sparsebundle is correctly formatted.. in the end this system doesn't work reliably.

I have tried to plug the external hard drive directly into the USB port of my Airport Extreme that is on my network as well but when I tried to connect to it -time machine could not find it.

What model is this extreme? How is the Mac connecting to it.

Apple does not support TM on a network disk without direct connection to the Mac.. ie wireless or ethernet must be directly to this extreme. (Some people get it working regardless but it is likely to be unreliable).

Apple does not support TM on Extreme versions earlier than the newest AC tower model. As Tesserax has noted in his list.. if this is not AC version.. then it is questionable if it will be reliable even if it does work.

Sorry, had to break up my replies ...

I thought I would be able to just plug the external hard drive directly into the NetGear router via its USB - I can do this but the hard drive needs to be partitioned as either GUID Partition Table or Master Boot Record - when I did the original set-up of the external drive I did not use either of these.

What did you finally partition and format the drive as?

My problem is now I want to use the external hard drive that I have but I certainly dont want to have erase all of the data that already have out their from the time machine back ups.

I have tried to plug the external hard drive directly into the USB port of my Airport Extreme that is on my network as well but when I tried to connect to it -time machine could not find it.

Anyone have any ideas on how I can save this data or at least maybe be able to access it when plugged in to the airport extreme.

Can the drive be found in Finder?