HT204057 Why does Time Machine no longer support external hard drives connected to an Airport Extreme base station?

I'm pretty sure that upto a few months ago I had a hard disk connected via USB to my Airport Extreme and I was able to backup all the computers on my home network. However, somehow over the last few months this had stopped happening. I am not able to select my network disks for time machine backup.
There is a very unhelpful sentence on Apple's website which simply says it does not allow backup to hard disks connected to Airport Extreme via USB. Does anyone know why this is? Is there a way around this? Can I connect a drive to my desktop computer and have other computers backup through the network to that?

This was never an approved configuration: OS X Mountain Lion: Disks you can use with Time Machine
Can I connect a drive to my desktop computer and have other computers backup through the network to that?
The above KB article indicates you can, though I have not personally tried it.

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HT201250 Can I use Time Machine to backup a LaCie Hard Drive connected to an Airport Extreme onto a My Book that is connected directly to a Mac Mini?

I have a LaCie 2TB hard drive connected to a Airport Extreme Base Station. I also have a 1TB MyBook connected to a Mac Mini. My question is can you backup selected files (photos) from the LaCie drive to the MyBook drive using Time Machine, or any other software? If it will cost a fortune, I guess I can always just copy the newer files over.

Thank you for such a lightning-fast response Niel :-) Can I just double check with you the following ...?
The external drive where my iPhoto library is located has three partitions - Time Machine Backup, Pictures (where the iPhoto library is located) and SuperDuper Bootable Clone.
When you say 'Remove the external drive from the list of items set to be excluded from the backup, and then add everything else on it' - am I correct in thinking that I should remove Pictures partition from the items to be excluded but leave the Time Machine Backup and SuperDuper Bootable Clone as excluded items?
On my 2TB external drive (the one I'm backing up to) there are 5 partitions - Time Machine Backup, SuperDuper Clone, Pictures, Photo Archive and Document Archive. The Time Machine Backup is 700GB of which I still have 473GB available - when I include the Pictures folder that contains the iPhoto library that will use up another 148GB but I think there's still plenty of room to use it.
When you say if the partition contain the iPhoto library isn't dedicated to it it may be easier to create one which is, the only item I have on the Pictures volume is the iPhoto library so I think that it's dedicated to it. I was going to add images from the Pictures folder on my MacBook Pro but haven't done so at this stage so I won't do so. It wouldn't matter though, would it, if I copied the images from the Pictures folder on my MBP to the 'Photo Archive' partition of the EHD?
Thank you once more for your reply.
Tricia

Will Time Machine work with an external hard drive connected (via usb) to Airport Extreme?

Will Time Machine work with an external hard drive connected (via usb) to Airport Extreme?

Sorry, but this article is about 4 years old, and was printed based on preliminary information at the time.
The bottom line here is that Apple does not officially support Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme.
If it works for you, great.
You might want to review the Apple Support documents below, which are far more recent than the article you reference:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2038
It is supported.....
This is NOT correct. Please do not post false information on the forums.

HT201250 Time machine back up using a external hard drive connected to the Airport extreme

How can I setup a time machine back up using a external hard drive connected to the Airport extreme? Even better for time managment purposes I want to use the Eithernet Thunderbolt connection for the first back up and then through the wifi there after for daily routine Time Machine back ups.

You can attach a hard drive, but Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port at the AirPort Extreme are not supported by Apple, so it's not possible to say what your actual results might be.
If you decide to try this, it would be wise to have a secondary backup plan in place as well.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

External hard drive connected to my airport extreme will no longer open, when navigating to it in Finder, the Finder window quits and reopens, cannot access hard drive, it is visible in airport utility, since the problem began I have updated firmware

External hard drive connected to my airport extreme will no longer open, when navigating to it in Finder, the Finder window quits and reopens, cannot access hard drive, it is visible in airport utility, since the problem began I have updated firmware on Extreme as well as both of my Airport Expresses. Hard drive is USB connected to Extreme.

Reboot the USB drive.. assuming it is powered.. or unplug and replug a self-powered drive.. (you should not use self-powered drives on AE before the latest model.. always use a powered hub).
Does the drive now appear in finder..
If not reboot both drive and the AE.. it should now appear.
If it doesn't work with direct connection try a powered hub.. that can help.

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.

Does time machine need a dedicated external hard drive or can I partition it?

I am trying to figure out the best way to back up my husband's computer. He has too much data so I need to get about 80 GB off his computer on to an external drive and then need to back that up as well. Right now I have two external drives one dedicated to time machine and one that backs up as a carbon copy bootable backup. I think both external drives are 500GB, but he is on the computer and I don't want to fuss with having him get off right now. I ordered an additional external drive so I have some where for his 80 GB of his data. I can take one of the external drives currently used for time machine and partition it (mac OS journaled) and use one of the parts for time machine and the other for the 80 GB of data. Will this affect our ability to get data off of time machine in the event his 5 year old hard drive dies? The 80 GB of data includes important photos, so I would like them in two places. I would consider cloud, but he is running Leopard and I know that iCloud only works with Lion.

Thanks to everyone for all your opinions and thanks to baltwo for this TM FAQ website. Before asking this question, I browsed the internet and some people advised that a hard drive needed to be dedicated. It seems now that if I partition the external drive and have a big enough drive that I should be ok.

Will Time Machine back up and external hard drive connected to my TC?

Here is my desired set-up: older Powerbook G4 whose iTunes Music is saved on an external HD (WD MyBook offering USB, FW, and ethernet connections); backup wirelessly to a Time Capsule using Time Machine; connect the external drive to the Time Capsule either using USB or ethernet (whichever is faster); have Time Machine backup everything, ie, the laptop and the external drive connected directly to the Time Capsule.
Right now, the external drive is connected directly to the Powerbook using Firewire and everything is working as desired. I would like to have the external drive networked, however, so that I can enjoy music on the laptop without having it connected to the external drive. Seems like I could connect the external drive to the TC to provide a networked iTunes library, but I also want Time Capsule to back it all up together with my Powerbook.
Is this possible?
If so, which connection method is best between the external drive and the Time Capsule, USB or ethernet?

f.bomb wrote:
Seems like I could connect the external drive to the TC to provide a networked iTunes library, but I also want Time Capsule to back it all up together with my Powerbook.
Is this possible?
No. Time Machine will not backup a network share such as you describe. Sorry.

Can 'Time Machine' back-up other external hard drives

Can 'Time Machine' back-up other external hard drives connected to your mac as well as the mac memory itself?

As Neil says, yes, it can. But external HDs are excluded by default; you have to tell Time Machine when you do want to back one up.
See the exclusions box in Time Machine Prefs > Options.
If the drive is shown in black, just select it and click the minus sign at the bottom.
If it's shown in gray, though, it's not formatted for a Mac, and Time Machine can't back it up (and you can't remove it).

Why can't I connect to my external hard drive anymore through my AirPort extreme?

I have a WD 500 GB external hard drive connected to my AirPort extreme that I have been using just fine for some time now. All of a sudden, I cannot access the files on the hard drive and when I try to connect to my AirPort in finder, the connection fails. What can I do to fix this?

If I restart my Mac it notices them
This is puzzling. You should not have to restart your Mac for drives to mount.
Also I plugged the hard drive directly into my Mac and had to restart it before it noticed it
Same as above. You should not have to restart the Mac for the drive to be recognized.
Connect the drive directly to the Mac and restart the Mac if necessary to mount the drive. Then run Verify Disk using Disk Utility on the Mac. If repairs are needed, run Repair Disk. Locate Disk Utility as follows:
Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
See if the drive is recognized at the AirPort Extreme. Post on your results.

I got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does someone has a fix???

i got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does anybody has a fix???

Does your external hard drive have it's own power supply? It should.
Is your external hard drive formatted with the NTFS file system? It won't work.
It needs to be formatted either with Mac OS Extended or FAT32.
(There are drivers available to add NTFS support to OS X but their quality is unknown, especially the "free" ones.)

HT204057 Time machine back up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme? It worked very well.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme?
Time Machine backups are supported via USB hard drive connected to the AirPort Extreme"ac" version.
Time Machine backups were not supported via USB hard drive connected to earlier versions of the AirPort Extreme.
Some users who tried this on earlier version AirPort Extremes seemed to have some success with Time Machine backups....some had moderate success and some had no success with this. Count me in the "no success" category.
See the topic about Time Machine support for USB disks in this Apple Support document:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5924?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Hallo ,why is it that when I delete a photo ,which is backed up by time machine and western digital external hard drive , that I am able to restore the photo okay but not the titles and descriptions . I have a Macbook 4.1, mac osx 10.5.8 . Iphoto 7.1.5 ,

QUESTION.
Hallo , my question is ;whenever I delete a photo and restore it through Time machine and Western digital external hard drive , I am able to restore the photo but not the titles and descriptions . Western Digital inform me that it isn't their external hard drive problem and suggest that it is an Apple software problem ?
I am using a Macbook 4.1 , with Mac OSX 10.5.8 . I photo 7.1.5 , last modifie4d 01/05/2010 -universal . Should I be upgrading Iphoto ?
I hope that someone is able to help in this matter , as i have to restore 12000 photos !
Thanking you in anticipation.
Alan from Wigton

Hallo Kieth ,
I am not quite ready to restore the full iphoto library , as I have days of work re - imputting titles,descriptions and enhancement . I hope that your suggestion works , as I use my Macbook basically to work with digital photography. Through time , I will need to delete my library to recover more disc space and I would hate to have to spend more time re - imputting titles and descriptions all over again .
Thanks for your interest and advice.
regards - Alan

HT201250 How can I migrate a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive to a new TimeCapsuls?

I just got a 2TB Time Capsule. I want to migrate my time machine backups on an external hard drive to the new Time Capsule. I have about 430Gb of files to back up; I don't want to wait 7-8 days for the backup, unless I have to. I am using OS 10.7.5 (forget which cat that is). I have mounted the TC drive as 10.0.1.1; I tried to drag and drop from old to "data" on TC, but I get the error "The volume is the wrong format for a backup." Any ideas how I can move my old files to the new, and bypass creating a brand new backup file?
Thanks.

Rather than do that, which means starting over from scratch, losing all your edits, organisation and so on, why not simply use iPhoto Library Manager to revert the Library to the older version? Easier, less destructive.
The instructions on that are here
If you really want to start over: you can access the Originals folder simply by going to your Pictures Folder and finding the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.

Re Time Machine I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory. I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything. will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous bac

Re Time Machine
I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory.
I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything.
will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous back ups?
can I split it the drive in two partitions?
Also
as I have two separate Macbook Pro's- one older than the other.
OSX 10.68
the other is
OSX 10.75
can I back them up separately?
or even synch and merge files and folders etc? between the two?

You CAN use a drive with files already on it to store Time Machine backups. But long term, that is not recommended. You do not need to reformat or re-partition the drive to do this. Once Time Machine Backups are established, you could remove the old files.
But do not delete Time Machines files with the Finder -- that can cause it to lose its place and lose everything.
With the cost of backup drives under US$100, it might be a better idea in the long run to get another drive. Best results from Time Machine is a drive about 3 times larger than the drive(s) you are backing up.

HT204057 Why does Time Machine no longer support external hard drives connected to an Airport Extreme base station?

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