How to get TimeMachine working again...
If you’ve been having problems with an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive and Apple’s Time Machine feature, you’re not alone - turns out a lot of us have been afflicted by the bug.
What takes place: You connect your drive, set it up using AirPort Utility and begin to save those valuable Time Machine files for back-up, recovery and data protection. It all goes swimmingly, and then you install AirPort 7.4.2...and a few hours later, your drive stops working. You can’t even access them using the Finder until you reboot your AirPort Extreme. And then, it only lasts a few hours and you must reboot all over again. Annoying...
MacOSXHints has figured out a fix, of sorts, suggesting afflicted users revert to AirPort 7.4.1. To roll back to that version you must run AirPort Utility, click on the Summary tab (in Manual set-up) and click on the word, ‘version’, there you get to choose the software version to install, as MacOSXHints informs.
Handy hint, which also underlines the likelihood of a new version of AirPort soon(ish).
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Comments (13)
Runing 7.4.2 here and at home just fine.
We were hit by the failing Time Machine bug (about a year after installation power fails, device is dead.. see apple forums). Luckily I managed to talk the apple store into giving us a free swapout as we had applecare on several of our laptops.
Same here, mine is dead. No applecare, out of luck. Lots and losts of people having that problem.
Me
Airport Extreme disks are not officially supported by Apple for Time Machine use. I would think the last thing you want to hack with is your backups.
Whether it's supported or not, users should never lose functionality based on a software or firmware upgrade. Upgrades are supposed to enhance and improve our functionality not inhibit it.
Thank you.
JR
How can they inhibit functionality they don't support?
Well considering this was supposed to be a feature before the AEB came out and then they pulled it, they should at least try not to break it.
The prior firmware supported this functionality. The current one does not...Duh!!!
It worked, but was not supported. And it didn't work that well. It was slow and buggy - hence Apple removed it.
The only sleazy part is Apple advertising this feature way back before Leopard was released. They shouldn't have done that. But since Leopard was released, Apple has always maintained Time Machine is not supported on the Airport Extreme.
I've had this problem with airport extreme and external HDs since it was sold! I think the problem is in the way the AE handles power failures and firmware updates. Basically a firmware update is like a power failure as well because it just cuts activity to the drive without unmounting it first. This causes coruption of the drive so when AE reboots it cannot access the drive again unless you are very lucky!
I've had to disconnect my drive and plug it into a mac and run drive utility to repair the drive each time. The problem is that even a small brownout causes this problem and both my AE and drive are on battery backup but I guess it doesn't kick in fast enough for the communication to break and corupt the drive again so I gave up on this feature.
Luckily it's not a matter of a couple of hours, however my Time Machine needs a restart one time every 1-2 weeks, otherwise it seems to be unavailable on the network.
This since the last update.
Anyone else?
Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance,
Luca.
I have used an external drive on my AEBS for a couple of months now without any problems. One thing that may be a factor is that I have been using firmware version 7.4.2 from the start. Could it be something about upgrading that sets off this problem?
i think this has something to do with sleep mode on external drives. airport doesn't seem to wake the drive up from sleep the way it did on the prior firmware.
i think this has something to do with sleep mode on external drives. airport doesn't seem to wake the drive up from sleep the way it did on the prior firmware.