Fix for owners of Desktops and Laptops for Time Machine Wirelessly

Question

Hey guys,
I have a fix for you to use which works well for me. Thus far I have had zero problems with it, was even able to allow a full 50 GB backup over wireless (took forever, but its the principle of it) as well as incremental backups. It requires NO terminal or any other stuff, just clicking around in the interface. Here's the steps I went through:
1.) Connect the Time Machine External Hard Drive to your desktop mac (any method, firewire preferred).
2.) Connect and establish the time machine drive as a time machine backup drive on your desktop. Allow the desktop to sync and begin its backup to the drive.
3.) Open your laptop
4.) Open finder
5.) Go to the "Shared" Section on the sidebar
6.) Find your desktop mac, connect to it as a full user (not a guest)
7.) Save the password, and make sure you have full access
8.) Find the external Time Machine Drive on your desktop's "Shared" Menu (Should be the bottom folder, will have a "Web Globe" On it
9.) Click the folder
10.) An eject symbol should appear next to the Time Machine External Drive Folder on the desktop section (If you are in column view in Finder)
11.) The drive should appear in your "Devices" Tab on the sidebar
12.) Open Time Machine Preferences
13.) Turn on Time Machine
14.) Select your drive from the list (should just be one)
15.) Allow the initial download to commence (upwards of 5 hours)
After the initial backup, incremental backups aren't noticeable. In fact, clicking on the Time Machine icon in the dock will "search" for the backup drive even if you don't have it mounted from the beginning. Just make sure your desktop stays on when your laptop is on so that it can backup. I haven't noticed any lag in my internet either. Good luck, let me know if there are problems or if this works for you too.
My specs:
iMac G5 (iSight) 20" 10.5
Macbook (White) 10.5
External Hard Drive: Western Digital MyBook, 500GB Firewire 400/800/USB

Answer 1

Edit: these are steps for making TM work with EHD attached to AEBS- not what I am saying we should do. BUT the step concerning "supported" drives might help alleviate unrecognized drives.
Quoting this from Mac-Forums (which quoted from Apple forums I guess):
"Another post:
From user A@ron posted in MacRumors:
TM working with airport disk in GM
Well thank me later I got it working fellas. It was there in front of our faces with the exception of doing a chown and chmod.
Someone else please confirm I will post steps.
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.
Best, Fernando"
Might work if you can't get TM to recoginize your drive. Could try the:
" In terminal "ls -l -a" the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t"
command. I dunno though. Patience is a virtue.
Message was edited by: Varick