Can I share my external hard drive over the Airport Extreme via the internet to someone in a different city?

Yes. Please see the following AirPort User Tip for details on several methods to do so.

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How do I access external hard drive connected to AirPort Extreme via iPad

Hello,
How do I access external hard drive connected to AirPort Extreme via iPad / windows laptop.
I donot have a Mac and I use windows laptop.

For your iPad, you will need an app, like FileBrowser, to access the external drive.
For your Windows laptop, you would access the drive like any other network share. The basic format is: \\<servername>\<sharename>, where, in this case, the servername is the base station name and the sharename is the name of the external drive.

Can you share an external hard drive over a network when your Apple Airport Extreme is in bridge mode?

Hello, is it possible to share an external hard drive over a network when I have my Airport Extreme in bridge mode? I can't use my AE as my main router at the moment but still want to be able to use the hard drive on the network, and the router I am using isn't capable of adding an external hard drive. I use Windows 7 and the other router is a Netgear. I have searched the communities and have not come across an answer to this question. I have tried several configurations within windows to try and see the hard drive but none have worked. I can see the hard drive when I run Airport utlities, but it cannot be seen on the network. Thanks to anyone who can help!

I think there is some confusion in this thread..
If you are sharing on a local LAN port forwarding is not required.
is it possible to share an external hard drive over a network when I have my Airport Extreme in bridge mode?
Answer is yes.. no port forwarding, mapping whatever term is used.. is needed. Port mapping is required when you cross over a NAT router.. as long as all the devices are inside a single LAN.. then no port mapping.
I assign to my Airport Extreme, do I do so with the settings of:
Service: SMB
Type: TCP
Server IP: xx.x.x.x
Port Start: 445
Port End: 445
This would not work even from WAN.. SMB is blocked by all responsible ISP.. there is simply too many unprotected windows machines out there. If they allowed SMB .. the world would be flooded with hijacked bots. And stolen data like bank accounts. SMB is not a secure protocol.
But this is not necessary on a LAN.
The problem can be Mavericks which does a terrible job presenting network drives.. The usual recommendations are to use AFP or force the connection to CIFS (ie SMB1 not 2).
If you use airport,, then use AFP.
In finder.. Go, Connect to server.
AFP://AEname or AEIPaddress. (replace with the network name of the AE or its actual IP address).
When asked for password.. type public if you did not change it or use whatever password you put.
Store the password in the keychain.

Connecting to an external hard drive connected to airport extreme via usb

I have two computers running off my airport extreme base station. I have a desktop computer connected via an ethernet connection and i have a laptop that connects wirelessly. I have an external hard drive connected via the usb on my Airport. I installed my airport disk utility software on my desktop as it is the computer i store all my itunes material on and it syncs to my ATV. I am able to see my external hard drive as a networked drive on my desktop, and it works fine. However i am not able to see the networked drive on my laptop. I am running Norton 360 on both machines and both machines are running Windows Vista.
Do I have to install the Airport Disk Utility on both machines? I have read thru lots of threads about this and have not been able to solve this problem. I have gone into my firewall settings and allowed file sharing on my laptop. I cannot think of anything else to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is the main reason I purchased my Airport Extreme.

I have exactly the same set-up, but I can see the portable drive with my MacBookPro but not with the PC connected by an ethernet cable to the Airport Extreme. How did you get the PC to see the portable drive on the Airport?

Using Time Machine w/external hard drive connected to airport extreme

I hooked up an external hard drive on my airport extreme. I see it in sharing, however, Time Machine doesn't recognize it as a back-up drive unless I have it directly connected to my MacBook Pro. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the external drive when it's connected to the airport?

FWIW, the AEBS has known problems sharing a directly connected HD. Take a look over in the AEBS forums, and you'll see that this is a very common problem. Perhaps Apple will update the firmware and rectify this problem.
Cheers,
Andreas

I have installed an external hard drive on my AirPort Extreme. How do I access it and tranfer photos and file to it from my Mac.

I have installed an external hard drive to my AirPort Extreme but cannot figure out how to transfer file/ photos, etc from my Mac, iPad or other IOS devices or to the hard drive. Any help?

From the Finder, go to the Go menu and select Network.

Can Time Machine back up a external hard drive connected to Airport Extreme

I recently purchased a new macbook pro, and airport extreme.
I attached a 750 GB external hard drive to the macbook pro, and reformatted it so time machine made the initial back up and hourly back ups from there.
Is it possible to now to unattach the external hard drive and attach it to the airport extreme, where the mac book time machine will back up to the external hard drive through airport extreme?
i have seen conflicting posts is if this is possible.

That would probably be safest.
Note that Apple's position on this got even more negative with Snow Leopard: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
It does work well for some folks, not so well for some, and not at all for others.
I got a refurb dual-band model in September. It worked well for about 3 months, but lately I get the error 109 and corrupted backups every few days, that Disk Utility can't fix. Once, Disk Warrior could, but since then, if they're corrupted, nothing helps. That's on a year-old Seagate drive that seems fine otherwise, especially when connected directly.
And I have an excellent wireless connection; it's only about 10 feet from my Mac, speeds are great, S/N ratio is good, etc.
It makes no sense to me that a TC would work better, but they seem to.

I want to share my external hard drive over the network

I found a lot of threads and discussions about this, but no answers.
I have a WD My Book External Hard Drive that I'm looking to share over the network. However, when I add the volume to the "Shared Folders" or even a folder within the volume and the "Users:" are grayed out.
When getting info on the volume, Sharing & Permissions says, "You can read and write"
Any ideas?

Hi Keith,
Thanks for your response; however, the first screenshot is through the Sharing settings in the System Preferences.

Can you share a USB hard drive over the network through an Airport Express?

After asking a few individuals at my local Apple Store, I have been consistantly told that I can plug in a usb hard drive into the bottom of my airport express and share it over the network.
However, after making sure my airport express has the latest firmware (6.3) and even donwloading and installing the airport disk utility I still am not having any luck getting my HFS (journaled) usb 2.0 hard drive to be visible on the network.
I have also noticed that when following the instructions on this apple support document (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AirportUtility/5.1/en/ap2108.html) that when I get to step 3, the option to click disks is grayed out. I assume this supports my theory that the airport express won't share hard drives, can anyone confirm?
Am I doing something wrong? Or were the reps at my store mistaken and the only hardware that can share a hard drive is the airport extreme not express?
Thanks
Message was edited by: althe3rd

Thanks for the swift reply.
Continuing my investigation I started to come to the conclusion you just mentioned. I am surprised none of the staff at my store realized this. However, at least I know now.
The basis for me looking to this is... With leopard on the eve of its release, I wanted to get a large network accessible storage solution that would allow my wife's and I's Macbook pros to use time machine on the network drive when we were at home. Since we rarely use our laptops while sitting at a desk connected to an external drive, I figured this would be a great idea and started to look into various NAS solutions.
Surprisingly, most generic (netgear, western digital) network drives require you use proprietary software to connect to them, and are only compatible with windows xp. After seeing the options the airport extreme opens up in terms of network storage I figured it would be the best bet.
Do you have any other suggestions besides getting an airport extreme? I would rather not have to buy a full blown mac that I have to leave on 24/7 to share the drives. Or do you see any possible pitfalls to this idea? Such as, would time machine forget to use the network drive after a while since it wouldn't always be available to it when away from home?

Can I share an external hard drive and simultaneously have it connected via firewire to my iMac?

Trying to get an external hard drive that is connected to my Airport Extreme to also be connected to my iMac via firewire 800. Any ideas?

That shouldn't be attempted. Unless the drive is specifically designed for it, which very few drives are, connecting it to more than one computer(which includes the base station for this purpose) at any given time through USB or FireWire can damage it.
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HT201250 Can I share an external hard drive for Time Machine with my PC?

I am using a PC with an external hard drive. I have a new MacBook and would like to back up the files on the external hard drive as well. Time Machine set-up notified me that if I continued my external hard drive would be wiped clean. Is there a way to save the files from my PC and add Time Machine?

Use the DIsk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to repartition the drive. The new partition needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If you want to back up the contents of that drive and not use that drive for holding backups, you need to use another backup method, such as drag-copying files or cloning.
(85248)

Using an external hard drive with an airport extreme and HP computer

- I recently bought the airport extreme, and also bought a Seagate external hard drive for my music files. I can see the hard drive on the airport utility but cannot access it or find where to access it. I am using an HP computer with windows 7.
Help please!

The AirPort Extreme cannot share out the attached Seagate USB hard drive if it is formatted in NTFS or ExFat. Please check to see that it is formatted in either FAT32 or HFS+ (Apple format).
If it is already formatted in either of the latter two formats, then verify that the AirPort Utility can properly identify the hard drive by using the AirPort Utility for Windows.
Finally please checkout the following Apple Support article for details on accessing this shared drive from a Windows PC.

IMac Media Server, or External Hard Drive Connected to Airport Extreme?

I would like to create a central repository for all of my movies/music which I would like to stream to an apple tv. For now, it is all iTunes compatible stuff. At the same time, i want to be able to access those media files from my iPad, iPhone, and other Mac machines throughout my house.
I currently have an iMac that is not often used. I had an idea to use it as a media server through which I could stream all of my media to the apple tv. The plan would be to buy a 3 or 4 TB hard drive, and connect the hard drive directly to the iMac (ideally via firewire), and then upload all of my movies/music to the hard drive, while keeping the libraries intact on the iMac. In addition, I would like to keep the library on my MBP, but direct the hard drive to utilize the media files on that same hard drive (so, essentially, using one set of media files, in two iTunes libraries). This way (I'm thinking), I should be able to stream my media from either library on my Apple TV (but in reality, the media is all on the one hard drive) and to my iDevices in my home.
The other option I have come up with is to connect a hard drive on the network, directly to the airport extreme (probably via USB, unless someone knows of a GE drive that is not a pre-formatted NAS server). Then I would hope to link the media libraries on both computers through to the media files stored on the hard drive.
So the questions I have are:
Which is the better set up for home streaming? Will one be faster than the other?
Is there a better way of doing this?
If I downloaded the Plex Media server to the iMac in the first option, would I be able to access all of the media on my Smart TV w/o the Apple TV?
Thanks in advance for your input.

Which is the better set up for home streaming? Will one be faster than the other?
Both will be about the same. The issue I would be sure to look at is how well the external hard drive's wake from sleep mode works. It is annoying if the drive sometimes goes to sleep and will not wake up without you waking over to the computer.
The direct connect via firewire is a slightly faster more reliable option, but not really something you will notice given the ATV would only need a fraction of the bandwith either have.
The more important thing for performace woudl be to use eithernet instead of WiFi. You will make your life a lot easer if you do not try to do streaming HD video over WiFi.
If I downloaded the Plex Media server to the iMac in the first option, would I be able to access all of the media on my Smart TV w/o the Apple TV?
No. ATV can only see content that is in your local iTunes setup or in iCloud. So in of these setups you will need the content on these drives to be added to iTunes.

I want to use external hard drive connected to airport extreme that contains iTunes library to airplay library to apple tv

I have a macbook 4.1 with 4gb ram running lion. I have a 3 tb external drive that i use for time machine bakcups and a partition for my itunes library. When I want to watch a movie I connect the external hard drive to my macbook, open itunes and airplay it to my apple tv. However, this solution is not optimal because I lose the use of my macbook when it has to be connected via usb to my hard drive.
What I want to do is be able to watch a movie on my apple tv via my external hard drive wirelessly.
I realize that hooking up an airport extreme to a harddrive for time capsule purposes is not supported and thats fine.
However, will this work for the purpose of airplaying itunes library to apple tv.
Also would this work with most other wireless routers that support external hard drives? Not asking for specifics here, because i know no one can know every device. But is there any technical problem that would prevent it.
Thanks

Yea I'm just going to wait for a solution I like better. The easiest way would be for apple to have some kind of itunes server software. Theres no reason that my computer running itunes shouldn't be able to communicate with with hard drive wirelessly just as it would with a usb cable. Kind of like wireless itunes synching with my iphone.
I don't want to use Itunes match because music is not my concern. It is the 1,000 movies that I want to watch on apple tv without tying up my laptop.
Thanks anyway

Access external hard drive connected to Airport Extreme USB via Windows & Mac

I have an Airport Extreme and I would like to connect an external hard drive to it via USB so that I can backup pictures, music, documents etc. I need to be able to see the external hard drive from my windows PC. I eventually will be buying a Mac so I would like to be able to also get to my pictures and documents via the MAC as well.
I currenlty have an iPhone, iPad and Apple TV so getting to the external drive from these devices would be a huge bonus also if that is possible.
I recently bought an ioSafe Solo External Hard Drive and I had to return it because it was only formatted for the PC. When I plugged it into my Airport Extreme, I could see the drive via the Airport Disk Utility but I could not see it from my PC and I could not map a drive to it. When I contacted ioSafe support, they said that what I was trying to do was not possible since I did not have a MAC available to me to reformat the drive.
I hope that I am not trying to accomplish the impossible because I will always need to live in a MAC/PC world.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time!

You must know people with Macs.. it is 2min work to plug a USB drive into a Mac Laptop and format it Mac OS extended with a quick format.. And that is better IMHO than buying a utility or buying a pre-formatted drive which are often more expensive for no very good or obvious reason.
Another option is a Linux boot disk.. Linux distributions have very similar command line tools to the Mac OS. (some are identical) and HFS+ has been available for ages in Linux.

Can I share my external hard drive over the Airport Extreme via the internet to someone in a different city?

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