No Time Machine for AEBS disks?
Apple’s new list of the 300 + new features in Leopard is indeed causing us to look at 10.5 as a more important update than we initially thought. However, it seems that while many new features have been added, one may have been taken away. Faithful Macenstein reader (and disappointed AirPort Extreme Base Station user) Deej writes:
“I was looking in the AirPort Discussion boards on Apple’s site, and noticed something which I think you’re reader should know about. Apparently Apple has removed all references of AirPort Disks from the description of Time Machine. By Way of comparison, here is the ‘old’ description, still found on the UK Apple site (and Google cache):”
Effortless meets wireless. With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.
“And here is the new one:”
You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.
Hmmm… Well, you’re right Deej, that does in indeed look kind of bad for AirPort users planning to use Time Machine to back up to AirPort Disks. Here’s hoping it’s either some sort of oversight on the part of Apple’s web copy guys, or that a AEBS firmware update is in the works to make this (once again) possible.
I can’t get the airport disk to work anyway. I guess it makes more sense being connected with firewire anyway.
May be this is related to the widely-reported problems with AEBS Disks ?(see wikipedia for a description of the problem). Printers are also affected. The only fix is to reboot the AEBS. The problem has been going on since mid-august and still no fix from Apple!!!! Check this two big threads:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1106671
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1144050
There are many more threads referring to the same issue…
If one need to reboot the AEBS to get access back to the drive, no way timemachine could use an unreliable backup disk…
That would be a shame. I was planning on using Time Machine to perform network backups at home. I usually use the wireless connection with my laptop and wanted to take advantage of network backups wherever it’s being used in the house. We’ll find out soon whether or not it’s still a Leopard feature.
Hey guys.
I have had problems with my AEBS locking up from day 1. It initially locked up every few hours.. and before I started tinkering with it, it was locking up every 15-30 minutes.
I found some threads that fixed all of my problems. I am using my disk just fine. I have not tried a printer, but presumably it works.
My problems were:
1) don’t use 5GHz – Not sure if it is my proximity to an air force base, but it was definitely locking up my base station.
2) turn off IPV6 tunneling. under “Advanced”, IPV6
3) turn off NAT port mapping protocol. under “internet”
Hope this helps the folks above.
-donut
Try these steps I saw posted on some forum I forget. They worked for me in making my Airport Disk to work with Time Machine:
1) disconnect airport disk and plug into computer as a USB drive directly.
2) Set up time machine to use this volume.
3) In terminal cd to volume “cd /Volume/HDD”
4) In terminal “touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported” this will create an invisible file.
5) In terminal “sudo chown root:admin .com.apple.timemachine.supported”
6) In terminal “sudo chmod 1775 .com.apple.timemachine.supported”
7) In terminal “ls -l -a” the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t
8) eject disk, unplug from mac, plug into Airport.
9) mount at mac using connect to server in finder (command k) and afp://airportname.local./HDname
10) see if time machine now sees the drive and tries to use it.