How to enable Time Machine for AEBS AirDisk
This is a follow-up to the post I made regarding Apple leaving the AirPort Extreme-N users out to dry. As you can see in the screen-shot above, tommy (whiskey) is my hard-drive which is plugged into my Airport Extreme which will be used for Time Machine backups. So if you have a AirPort Extreme (AEBS) with a hard-drive plugged in via USB and would like to use it with Time Machine, type in the following in Terminal.app:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
This will set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, or any other NAS volume you might have like ReadyNAS. So we basically now have a Time Capsule type of setup. Only thing is that, using your AEBS and Time Machine is not recommend for critical data because the AEBS is known to corrupt hard-drives plugged into it. Apple obviously disabled this feature in Leopard because Time Machine is buggy when backing up over the wire. So I would not use an AirPort based AirDisk for critical data storage until Apple releases a fix for the AEBS, and or Time Machine. Hopefully we will see something when Time Capsule is released.
Joel Esler Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 10:16 am
I think the reason that Apple didn’t allow this is the inconsistency in quality of USB drives that could be plugged into the AEBS. That’s why they went with a “Server class” drive in their new Time Capsule.
Tom Ferris Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 2:41 pm
This is true.. AirDisk will stop working once you have copied a few gigs of data over. The hard-drive which is attached will just disappear.
Tobias Horvath Said,
March 1, 2008 @ 6:11 pm
The so-called “server grade” hard disk you are speaking of is nothing but a regular Hitachi DeskStar, having nothing to do with server-grade quality.
Not enabling backing up over AirDisk but doing it over Time Capsule “might” be an engineering issue. But not working this out by the time Time Capsule was released smells a lot like wanting to drive Time Capsule sales.
Jesper DJ Said,
May 2, 2008 @ 11:09 am
Actually, I have been using my Iomega HDD connected to my AEBS USB port for sime time now, backing up (wirelessly of course) via Time Machine from both my wifes Macbook and my own iMac.It went smooth for 5-6 weeks, but here the other day it suddenly disappeared from TM(and AEBS!). And now I simply cannot make my AE “see” the usb-attached harddrive.