Apple updates Time Machine and Airport - Now working together!

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 4:45pm — Quincy Pince-Nez

Apple has now filled what was a gaping hole in their Time Machine backup ecosystem. You can now use Airport connected HFS+ Formatted USB hard drives to backup your Leopard computers. Apple had promised this feature long ago and then pulled the advertising for the "Airport Disk Time Machine Backups" and hasn't able to deliver during the first two releases of Leopard. This might have been more difficult than originally planned (though our Flux Capacitor has helped many).

Apple has now released Airport and Time Machine updates that now allow you to see Airport connected USB drives and back up to them like Time Capsule drives.

It isn't known whether Apple waited to sell a few Time Capsules before releasing this fix or the company genuinely didn't have all of the pieces together. Anyway. Download and backup to your heart's content.

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Tips and Tricks

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Comments

Is the airport magical?

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 5:10pm — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

Is there something magical about a USB drive connected to an AirPort, or could one use TM to backup to any network attached storage. I find it hard to believe that this couldn't easily be done with any NAS aside from Apple keeping everything proprietary to sell it's own hardware.

no magic

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 10:17pm — kevin (not verified)

i've been backing up wirelessly since 10.5.0 came out...i have a usb drive attached to a headless mac mini, file sharing is turned on, and the mounted drive is shared...a macbook pro, a macbook, and another mac mini all backup to the usb drive wirelessly when connected to the server...i didn't have to do anything special to time machine at all...the macbook pro does leave the house to go to work with me, but once i return home i just connect to the headless mini in the finder and my backups resume shortly thereafter...

all machines are running leopard...the headless mini is NOT running leopard server...

http://9to5mac.com/time-machi

Thu, 03/20/2008 - 4:30am — admin

http://9to5mac.com/time-machine-fix-flux-capacitor-43262455

It seems to have broken Airport Utility

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 6:32pm — Chris (not verified)

I just applied the update, and now Airport Utility reports that it is "unable to find any Apple wireless device... click rescan to try again." The device it can't find is the device to which I'm connected right now.

A restart fixed it

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 6:35pm — Chris (not verified)

I restarted the Airport, and now Airport Utility can find it.

Drives Not Showing

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 7:09pm — Jackson (not verified)

I have done all the updates and when I go to the time machine system preferences pane and look for the disks they do not show up. They show up in finder as air-disks but not as backup disks in system prefs. Any suggestions?

oops restart cured me

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 10:48pm — Jackson (not verified)

oops restart cured me

Drop-off problems

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 7:38pm — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

I returned my Extreme Base Station(Gigabit) because of constant drop-offs. This has been a rampant problem. If this update solves this problem I will try again. Please let me know. Thanks.

It works for me, though I

Wed, 03/19/2008 - 11:50pm — RoDe (not verified)

It works for me, though I must say. The Time capsule is far more stable.

Airport fixed ???

Thu, 03/20/2008 - 12:18am — Almgren (not verified)

Going from what must have been the slowest airport connection on earth, to something that looks normal.
Looks like this update fixed the problem with slow connectionspeed, dropouts and so on. For me it did.
Be sure to update your basestation (7.3.1 firmware http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/timecapsuleandairportbasestation8... )

MBP 2.33 C2D / 2G / 10.5.2
Airport Extreme
802.11n 5GHz

Does this update only works

Thu, 03/20/2008 - 2:08am — Sander (not verified)

Does this update only works with the airport extreme base station, or can you also connect a hard drive to your Airport Express?

Airport express

Thu, 03/20/2008 - 6:04am — raff (not verified)

i'm afraid not, according to this:
http://www.apple.com/wifi/

this has just been updated by apple.

I wish it does, this would be my fav functionality added, but apple wants you to buy more than one product to cover everything you need. Don't hate them, they need to make money..

Drives Now Showing

Thu, 03/20/2008 - 9:44am — Jackson (not verified)

If any of you are trying to connect to your disk for a backup but they don't show up reformat your disk via USB to "mac OS X Extended (journaled)" and it should work.