Time Machine to AirPort Disk: good luck with that says Apple

If I had a real, working time machine, I think I'd go back to when Apple announced some of the exciting, new features of Mac OS X Leopard. Back then I seem to recall that the new Time Machine feature was touted as working on USB drives tethered to AirPort Extreme Base Stations as well as USB storage connected directly to a Mac. Not long after the announcements and hoopla died down, that little tidbit about AirPort Disks disappeared. What could a consumer do... go back in time to see if the details were actually changed?

Hit the gas pedal and zoom up to 88mph in your DeLorean and fast forward to present day. With the last round of updates to the AirPort Extreme back in March, Airport Disks were suddenly working with Time Machine and all was right with the temporal time-lines. Or was it?

I've actually had some issues with Time Machine on our two Macs: it simply isn't working consistently for us. It's getting to the point where I'll have to use one of the two USB ports on my MacBook Pro for my own backup and then do some tom-foolery and sharing to get Barb's iMac to see the drive through my machine. Perhaps I should call Apple support on this one, no? Actually, that won't work either according to TidBITS: Time Machine backups to AirPort disk is an unsupported feature, so you're on your own. Not only is the "feature" unreliable for me, I can't even get support for it. That's a shame because it's one of the reasons I bought an AirPort Extreme in the first place.

If Apple could see into the past they'd know that many folks did... me thinks it's time (heh) to look for another backup solution without the word "time" in it. Not only one that works, but one that's supported too. I get the feeling that right after the first Time Machine announcement, someone at Apple said: "Hey, wait! After hearing how we described this feature I had a brilliant idea! Why don't we add a hard drive to our AEBS and scrub the AirPort Disk support? We'll make meeeehllions!"

Comments

[Scotty]

Kevin, have you tried turning off IPv6 on your Airport router? This has helped people get the file sharing protocols to work better.

http://www.macwindows.com/

[Taxman]

It took days to do the first backup but it seems to be working okay now for me. I'm backing up my machine and my wife's. I sometimes have to tell it to back-up now to start things up.

[Alan]

I have it working fine on my setup. It sometimes is slow, but is great! I have an apple Macbook pro backup via Linksys WIFI ap. The disk are connected to an NSLU2 which is on the network. I have no problems. The only issue I had was telling Time Machine to see a network drive. Oh and sometimes the Mac displays the nslu2 drive. I have to remember not to disconnect it. If I do then the backup fails.