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April 7, 2008

hardware

Dammit: Time Machine over AirPort Disk unsupported

Posted Apr. 7, ’08, 12:52 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Hardware

timemachineairport.jpgFor the first time in the history of Ever, all my computers are actively automatically backing up their data, providing me protection from “uh ohs” and “boo boos” and “aww craps.” My iMac uses Time Machine to backup to a connected 1TB USB hard drive, and my MacBook Air — for which I’m too lazy to constantly connect to an external disk — uses Time Machine to backup automatically to a 750GB USB drive connected to my 802.11n AirPort Extreme, a la Time Capsule. That feature was added — without mention — in the Time Machine and Airport Updates 1.0 from March.

It works flawlessly: Whenever my MacBook Air is connected to my wireless network, it backups to the disk attached to the AirPort Extreme on the regular Time Machine schedule — slow, of course, but it gets the job done. And it alleviated all the resentment I had built up towards Apple for introducing Time Capsule, which basically spit in the face all of us who already own both AirPort Extremes and high-capacity external HDDs.

But Apple couldn’t leave Well Enough alone, and is continuing on their trend of poo-poo’ing my happiness and kicking me in the shin: Glenn Fleishman — a notorious Time Machine/AirDisk skeptic — got word from Apple that this newly-enabled feature was more or less a mistake, and wasn’t supposed to be in the update. And, consequently, is unsupported.

What does it mean? “If you attempt to use an 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station for Time Machine backup, you won’t get any help from Apple’s technical support” — which, unless you’re tech-savvy and theoretically able to troubleshoot problems on your own, can be somewhat of a problem.

Another issue that concerns me is that if this is just a woopsie on Apple’s part, they may be inclined to again pull the feature in the next AirPort update, ruining my sweet backup configuration…just to piss me off. It also probably means they won’t be working to improve the feature, which is known to be flaky and annoyingly unpredictable.

Dammit.

Anyone out there in Reader Land use Time Machine over AirPort Disk? Successfully? Unsuccessfully? Anyone?


15 Comments

DWesnor said:
which is known to be flaky and annoyingly unpredictable

Not features that I consider to be compatible with a backup solution.

April 7, 2008 1:05 PM
krye said:

If you're so unhappy eBay your stuff and buy a Time Capsule.

April 7, 2008 1:20 PM
Ryu said:

Well if enough people make a big fuss about it Apple will likely just leave it as it is and Airdisk will hopefully not be pulled in the next Airport update.

April 7, 2008 1:21 PM
Dan Pourhadi said:

@DWesnor - Lemme clarify: If you can get it to recognize your drive and start a backup, it will theoretically work pretty well. The flakiness generally comes from getting the thing to work in the first place. But once the backup(s) is(are) made, they're on your disk.

@skyre - A lot of unnecessary hassle for something that could work if Apple just let it.

April 7, 2008 1:28 PM
Dave-O said:

"which is known to be flaky and annoyingly unpredictable"

That wouldn't be why it's unsupported, you think?

April 7, 2008 2:39 PM
Joshua said:

Hello!

Got 3 Macs in my house:

1 - Macbook: TM is a FW attached RAID HD

2 - Mac Mini: TM is a FW attached HD

3 - G4 iBook: TM is a USB AirDisk Drive connected to an AirPort Extreme (non-gigabit).

I didn't have any troubles getting the AirDisk to work with the G4, which connects via 802.11 G.

I did the initial sync over ethernet. After that, every time I connect wirelessly to the network, it mounts the sparse image for Time Machine, and backups every hour on the hour.

Now, granted this machine is my mothers, and she only uses it for email, surfing, cookbook, etc... so there isn't much to backup; but I've still NEVER had a problem with it.

I think now that it's been released, they are stuck with this feature. I hope they realize that and work to make it be the best it can be. ...

If they remove it, I'm sure they will get a LOT more smoke over it, than just those of us who bought Extremes with the intention of using TM with Air Disks.

By the way, I was one of those people. I WILL NOT buy a Time Capsule. Yes I'm pissed. Jobs shouldn't have said it was going to happen, if they had ANY doubt of it's stability...

Hell, I even bought a gigabit AirPort Extreme.

:-X

April 7, 2008 3:04 PM
jcow said:

Sounds like a pretty cool setup but for the problems. I want to do something similar, so it is nice to know what I am getting into. Apple is having a lot of trouble with tech support lately. Saw this one earlier: http://www.starkmanassociates.com/blogs/eric/apple-vs-bmw/

Kind of hit or miss at apple. It is generally really good when they will actually give you the time of day.

April 7, 2008 3:05 PM
barry said:

This is annoying... I have this up and running with a small test USB disk and it works seamlessly - very nice system for laptops. I can live without the Apple tech support (I hope), but I am disturbed by the idea that they might turn this feature off in a future update. I was planning on investing in a larger usb drive for this purpose to back up two laptops, but could end up wasting my $s.

April 7, 2008 3:09 PM
Daniel Pertovt said:

I tried to do it with my airport base station extreme and it was so flaky about not mounting the backup volumes that I have gone back to using a wired connection to ensure that the backups are done. Not sure if this is because my MBP is not 802.11n or not but not reliable enough to continue.

April 7, 2008 3:53 PM
Anonymous said:

Boooearns

April 7, 2008 4:08 PM
john said:

I have successfully used the time machine backup on my AEBS with a 500Gb usb hard drive. I have backed up three of my macs wirelessly. I does take a long time to do the initial backup, fine after that.

April 7, 2008 4:41 PM
butaking said:

got TM to work with AEBS and Airport Disk (500gb usb WD mybook).

April 7, 2008 5:22 PM
Glenn Fleishman Author Profile Page said:

"a notorious Time Machine/AirDisk skeptic": I am also full of hatorade for kittens, unicorns, and rainbows.

I actually love Time Machine! Parts of it. From here....to here.

Seriously, I want an Advanced button on Time Machine's preference pane so I could set a couple of very small parameters.

April 7, 2008 7:14 PM
Scooter said:

All this fuss! I had an AirPort Extreme but bought the Time Capsule anyway. I figured, I can eBay the AirPort (it was used about 1 month or so) and for the price, the 1TB the Time Capsule offered was a good deal from a storage capacity viewpoint itself. Why go through all the hassle? Just use the AirPort Extreme somewhere else or give it away to a relative or dump it on eBay - plenty of people want them if they're in nice shape - and get a Time Capsule and be done with it. All this fuss over some kind of "moral" issue or whatever - look, Apple does and develops whatever it wants, and if people don't like it, they don't buy it, or concoct some method to get around buying it. If you can get AirPort Extreme to work with a hard disk, then fine, use it, even if not supported, but what's wrong with 1TB of storage for a good price anyway? I get the feeling people are just refusing to accept it out of spite, which seems childish in a way. Remember, I also shelled out money for the APE, but in the end, 1TB of storage and the smooth compatibility I got with my MBP were well worth the little hassle of having to think of something else to do with the APE. Of course, I am a recent Mac convert (early 2008) so I am unfortunately used to another company screwing its users every few years with different versions, formats, etc. ("This file was saved as a previous version of Excel and some features or formatting may be lost.... [hint: why don't'cha upgrade and spend some money to see the same thing you saw all along but can't now, suckaa??]"

April 7, 2008 7:25 PM
aev said:

I connect myt iMac to an Airport Extreme by 802.11n and I use an external disc connected to de Airport... It works OK!!

April 8, 2008 4:03 AM

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