Is the Airport Extreme Hard Drive sharing ok for Time Machine?

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?

Unless the content of time machine is minuscule, USB will perform the worst at consistent data throughput. You might consider an ethernet storage device instead. The base station supports Gigabit Ethernet (though Wireless 'n' is maximised well below that).

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Down loaded Mavericks, will not install on my computer because it says "this hard drive is used for time machine back up".

Down loaded mavericks, it will not install on my computer because it says" this hard drive is used for time machine back up". So I used my old computer hard drive for back up and reloaded the program but it still says the first hard drive is being used.

Welcome to Apple Support Communities
Make sure you have selected your MacBook Pro's hard drive as the destination to install Mavericks. If so, you have the "Backups.backupdb" folder in the root level of your hard drive.
That's the folder used by Time Machine to store backups of your files, and the Mavericks installer understands that your internal hard disk is the Time Machine drive.
To fix this, open a Finder window, select the Go menu (on the menu bar) > Go to Folder, and type:
Then, delete "Backups.backupdb", empty the Trash and run the Mavericks installer. Finally, install OS X Mavericks

Cannot install Yosemite as hard drive is used for Time Machine Backup, How Do I Change This?

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and when I attempted to install Yosemite the MacBook Pro Drive is greyed out and a message appears that read,"drive is used for Time Machine Backup." How do I change this to install Yosemite?
Thanks,
Scott

Well, if you don't want to use that drive for Time Machine anymore, then you should format it using Disk Utility. Then you can install Yosemite on it.
You should, of course, have another full backup somewhere. I really can't state this strongly enough: You should have a full and complete and up to date backup of all your data before you upgrade to OS X Yosemite.

Airport Extreme - hard drive set up for multiple computers in network

I have been having problems setting up my USB portable hard drive into the Airport Extreme. I am trying to set it up so that I can access the hard drive using both my Apple Laptop and my Windows desktop. Could someone assist me with this? or perhaps point me to the right how to link?
Thank you,
Raul

Check to see if the issue is with the following: In Windows double-click My Network Places. Select View Network Connections. Right-click on Local Area Connection and select Properties from the menu. Client for Microsoft Networks must be checked in order for any of the Apple disk software to work. If it isn't, check it and click OK.
After I did this I was able to use all Apple software as it was designed - everything just "worked".

Using the same external hard drive to host a Time Machine partition + a test recovery partition: no longer possible?

In 10.7, I used to have one external hard drive with two partitions:
1) a Time Machine partition that I used to back up my internal hard drive;
2) another partition that I used once a month as a target partition to test the restoration of my Time Machine backup (because having a backup is a good first step, but regularly making sure it could be usable for a full recovery in case of a failure of my internal hard drive is important as well).
After upgrading to 10.9, my first backup restoration test failed with the error message "An error occurred while adding a recovery system to the destination disk." I found the following discussion:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4370294
which suggests that I need to make sure my external hard drive is formated using GUID and/or that I need to install 10.7 on the target drive. I checked in the Disk Utility, and indeed my external hard drive is formatted using Apple Partition Map rather than GUID.
I also found the following KB article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5911
which suggests that, to be able to install 10.9 on the external hard drive, I need to configure it to have only one partition.
Can anyone confirm that it is no longer possible to perform a backup recovery test on the same external hard drive as the one hosting the Time Machine partition? Do I now need a second external hard drive if I want to perform such a restoration test?
Thanks in advance for your insights.

Answering my own question: I managed to perform the restoration test on a second external hard drive. The trick was to make sure it was partitioned using GUID. I didn't even have to first install OS 10.9 on the second partition (I had an old restoration of 10.7 on there).

Lion Installer thinks that my internal boot hard drive "is used for time machine backups"

I recently installed a new hard drive on my MBP. It's been running fine, but now I'm running into trouble when I tried to install Lion!
The download worked just fine. But when I try to choose a disk to install Lion onto, my one and only hard drive (internal, boot disk) "is used for Time Machine backups" and is grayed out! I can't click it, I can't customize the installation or do anything except go backwards through the license agreement and such.
No, I do not use my internal drive as a Time Machine. But somehow, even after I've disabled Time Machine, it keeps thinking I do! Time Machine is my menu bar is grayed out, but I can click "Browse other Time Machine disks" and for some reason my boot disk comes up! ("(My name)'s MacBook Pro on 'Untitled 1') I've never used this disk as a Time Machine!
I have a feeling that this is somehow related to my using Super Duper to clone my old hard drive during the upgrade process.
Is there a way to remove the Time Machine files from my boot disk or otherwise convince Lion to install? I've already repaired my disk permissions in Disk Utility. What else can I do?
Thank you in advance. This is very frustrating!

Alexander Chan1 wrote:
No, I do not use my internal drive as a Time Machine. But somehow, even after I've disabled Time Machine, it keeps thinking I do!
At some point, probably accidentally, your internal HD was selected as a destination for Time Machine. Even if that was immediately changed, it had already created a Backups.backupdb folder at the top level of the drive.
As long as that's there, OSX thinks you're trying to install OSX on your backup drive. Just delete that folder.

How do I prevent my hard drive being used for time machine back ups?

I want to install Snow Leopard but it tells me that the OS cannot be installed because the disk is being used for Time Machine back ups. I don't recall setting up my hard drive to be used this way (why would I?!) but now I can't seem to

Did you have TM turned on at any time? If so, and if you had no external hard drive attached, could it be that it created its own backup on a portion of your hard drive? I don't use TM, but I believe I read that this may be possible. Take a look at Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and report what you see on the left - under the top heading, is there more than one partition showing, such as here:
(I have two partitions: one for Snow Leopard, the other for Lion) - what does yours show?

Use Time Capsule as a Hard Drive via Ethernet for Time Machine

Hi Folks
To summarise a very very long story here goes;
- About 12 months ago my father in law buys a Time Capsule without really knowing what it is for and how it works (I know don't ask!!!!!)
- I set it up for him connected to his wireless router so he uses his router to access the internet and uses the Time Capsule to back up his iMac via wireless with Time Machine. (from what I can see he could have saved himself some cash and just bought an external Hard Drive and connect it via USB to the iMac for Time Machine, but never mind. He has 1 iMac and no other Mac's in the household. His printer is connected to his iMac via USB in the same room and he uses a wireless router to access the internet, since the phone point is in another room)
- All is well until Monday when he tells me he cannot access the internet. After much much trial and error I have eventually managed to get his internet back up and running, but he has somehow managed to erase his Time Capsule.
- I set his Time Capsule back up as it was previously and it starts performing the initial backup again. However at the rate its taking I think it will take well in excess of 24hrs to do that initial
backup. Also so far It has failed 3 times during this initial backup and I get an error message stating it's failed. The setup guide makes reference to performing the initial backup via ethernet as it's quicker.
I'm thinking the best way forward would be to just plug the Time Capsule into the iMac via ethernet and use it purely as a Hard Drive for use with Time Machine. I've tried just plugging in the ethernet cable from the Time Capsule to the iMac, but it doesn't recognise it. Bear in mind that it currently works via wireless, do I need to perform some sort of factory reset or how do I go about telling the the iMac to no longer use the Time Capsule wireless, but just connect via ethernet instead.
Of course I could just forget about the Time Capsule all together and tell him to get a 500gb USB External Hard Drive, plug that in and set up Time Machine with that instead.
Am I missing the point here and can the Time Capsule do a lot more for him, given his current setup.
Thanks

That is true but if you mix your files with the Time Machine backups, Time Machine will have trouble contril disk space when it gets low.
If you are going to do that it is recommended that you partition the drive. Since Time Capsule is not able to partition the drive that means you will have to remove it in order to partition it.
A simple solution IMO is to get another external drive and hang it on the USB bus in the Time Capasule.
Allan

HT3275 How do you Format the external hard drive been used for time machine?

Error reads "Not enough space on the external hard drive" How do i format the memory and start again?
Thanks Geremy

ON an external hard drive.. that is easy.. just open disk utility and reformat it. Make sure you use Mac Extended Journeled. (HFS+)

Lion installation problem- says hard drive is used for Time Machine back-ups!

I just purchased & downloaded Lion to install on my Apple laptop, but when I went to install it, I got the message:
"This disk is used for TimeMachine back-ups."
What the heck? As I use an external drive for TM back-ups, I'm really confused! How can I get Lion to install on my hard drive? I went so far as to turn off TimeMachine (see image, below), but it's still not working.
Any ideas? This is really frustrating!

Kathy,
Intel and Universal apps should be ok. You can check this massive list for specifics on any application incompatibilities.
http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_a/index_tags/_a
Just to confirm, was the problem Norton or was the backup directory present?
Glad your up and running now.
@Colin, Yeah it's the leftmost black and yellow. It's an image burned in my head from the old PC days.

My external hard drive I use for time machine failed.

I replaced it with a new drive and used a new name for the drive. Time machine uses the new drive (with new name) and backs up to it without any problem.
But every day, Time Machine complains it can't back up to the old drive. I can't delete the old drive from the Time Machine GUI. How do I fix this? Is there a way I can edit a system file using terminal?

Instead of using Terminal, try to reset Time Machine to default settings, following these steps > http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html You won't lose anything

Perfect Hard Drive To Use With Time Machine?

Hi,
Has anyone found out what's the perfect External Hard Drive to use with Time Machine?
I have experience with a few of WD's My Book models (Essential, Pro and Studio). The problem with all of them is that they automatically keep switching themselves off (spin down) and on (spin up) throughout the day, in an effort to save power. But it's actually quite annoying. The My Book drive will automatically turn itself off, and then turn back on again within the space of one minute. Also, going to use Spotlight (even if you've excluded Time Machine Backups from being indexed) will automatically prompt the My Book drive to turn back on, which introduces a small delay to using Spotlight.
Does anyone make an External Hard Drive, with a Firewire 400 or 800 connection, that stays on ALL the time and doesn't automatically make decisions about when it should spin down or spin up?

I'am using a 500Gb Freecom Pro Hard Drive connected on USB via my Cinema Display. I so forget about it that I often forget to disconnect it from my laptop before leaving the office... Never complained about it
Btw, it does not implements the energy saver Auto turn off/on feature which I don't need cause the time it could mostly be really useful is by night. As it stops when I disconnect the USB and start again when I connect it back.. this is perfect to me.
I must say I'm quite happy with every Freecom product I bought and this one certainly don't break the rule

Primary Hard Drive Recognized as a Time Machine Backup Drive

Hi,
I am having some trouble installing the latest OSX Mavericks due to the installation application erroneously recognizing my primary hard drive being used for Time Machine backups. I have removed my backup drive from Time Machine, removed the backup drive from my laptop altogether, turned off Time Machine in system preferences and restarted numerous times in an attempt to get the OSX Mavericks installer to recognize my primary hard drive.
Is anyone else having this problem? Is there something I am missing?
Thanks!

As Time Machine deletes files when the drive gets too full (deletes the oldest backup to make room for a new backup), it would depend on which backup your movies are and when they'd get deleted. Once you delete them on your hard drive, they won't be in the newest TM backups either. I'd suggest you copy them to another hard drive or a flash drive/USB stick - of course they'd need to be large enough.

Airport extreme/hard drive problems

Any advice appreciated...
Our airport extreme only intermittently recognizes our Lace hard drive and it's driving us crazy. We bought macbook, the airport, and hard drive at the same time (yes we abandoned the PC world) and had a friend hook it up. For two months everything worked fine and we even hooked our printer to the airport and printed wirelessly.
Then for no particular reason, the harddrive disappeared and we can no longer access it wirelessly. We can, however, plug the harddrive USB into the Macbook and we can use the harddrive perfectly. Also, interesting, if we open airport utility and click on "disks", the harddrive is there, but it doesn't show up on the desktop or Finder and we can't access it.
I've called Apple tech support numerous times (We bought the extra service, but sadly that didn't keep us from having to spend an extremely obnoxious time on hold. We thought Apples were supposed to easy. but that's another story..). So far, we did get the airport and Macbook to recognize the hard drive by simultaneously renaming the harddrive and unplugging the hard drive and Airport. That worked for exactly 18 hours. Then the harddrive disappeared again. I called tech support twice but after 45 minutes on hold each time, I lost my patience. (They make us hold for the first step, then hold again for the product specialists. Gee we sure are glad we spent extra for the extended service!)
Other interesting tidbits: We've never had a problem with wireless internet service and have always been able to wireless send jobs to the printer.
Any ideas?
Signed and thank you,
Not so sure switching to Apple was a good move.

This is the most acceptable solution I have come up with:
Either go to the DHCP tab under internet settings on the router and "reserve" IP numbers for any hardware that interacts with the drive or manually set IP numbers in your network instead of using DHCP. The problem occurs when an IP number to any computer connected to the drive changes unexpectedly. This would be whenever the DHCP lease renews if your computer is asleep when this happens. I have not had a single drive issue since I set this up.
If you need to access your drive from a remote location where you don't have control over how the network there operates, then avoid letting your computer sleep while it is connected to the drive.
I chose to manually assign an IP number to my desktop and also to remote base stations, however this is not so convenient for my laptop because it then wants to use the manual settings everywhere unless I set up another "location" which has to be manually changed. This is where reserving IP numbers under the DHCP tab was really useful. The laptops on my network are still getting their numbers from the DHCP server but the server knows to give each one the same number based on their MAC addresses.
If you take a look at the default settings for DHCP, you will notice that not all the available numbers are being assigned through the DHCP server. You can use numbers outside this range (other than x.x.x.255) for your manually assigned IP numbers and still have DHCP running for when guests come over to use your network.
Message was edited by: Tom Alperin

Can I save files to the external hard drive if I am time machinging to that hard drive? Not while time machine is doing it's thing of course, but any other time.

I have a 2 TB Toshiba external hard drive that I want to save files to and also time machine to it (is that called making it a time capsule?). I want to know if this is possible before I reformat the drive to the 'journaled' format to make it usable for time machining. And if it is possible, how do I do it? Just save/transfer stuff to the external hard drive like I normally would or do I have to di something different? I just can't afford to have all 77 GB of my pictures on my internal hard drive anymore.
Also, I am mainly trying to set up time machine so I can have a backup before I upgrade from Snow Leopard to Mavericks.
Thank you!

KP. wrote:
I have a 2 TB Toshiba external hard drive that I want to save files to and also time machine to it (is that called making it a time capsule?). I want to know if this is possible before I reformat the drive to the 'journaled' format to make it usable for time machining. And if it is possible, how do I do it? Just save/transfer stuff to the external hard drive like I normally would or do I have to di something different? I just can't afford to have all 77 GB of my pictures on my internal hard drive anymore.
Also, I am mainly trying to set up time machine so I can have a backup before I upgrade from Snow Leopard to Mavericks.
Thank you!
Time capsule is an Apple product, a combination router/HD specific for wireless TimeMachine.
You can use Ext HD for saving files to etc as well
Time Machine needs it own partition and needs to be the first partition on the Harddrive.
Reformatting the drive GUID, extended journeled
Done through DiskUtility

Is the Airport Extreme Hard Drive sharing ok for Time Machine?

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