Time Machine & Airport Extreme Hard Drive Questions

I purchased a LaCie 500 GB hard drive to use as a backup for Time Machine intending to attach it to my Airport 1802.n. It would not mount on my MacBookPro 3.1 and Time Machine didn’t see it. I could see the Drive using Airport Utility but not using Airport Disk Utility.
I then tried to get Time Machine to recognize LaCie by directly attaching it to my computer and let Time Machine use it for the initial backup (This is a painful way to operate!). After completing the backup, I reattached it to Airport and manually mounted it using “Connect to Server…”, the only way that it would mount.
I then entered Time Machine Perfs and Time Machine knew it was attached. So, I started a backup. Instead of using the LaCie, a disk image named Backup of Gene’s Mac appeared and Time Machine put a full backup on the image. My LaCie got a strange folder added named “NAME.sparsebundle”. It’s not sparse. The folder contains 21 GB. It is the size of the original backup. Ultimately, I rebooted and everything on the disk image went away. Time Machine now produces an error message when it tries to start. The message is “Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory. I handled this problem by turning Time Machine off and then rebooting. I dragged the disk image to the Trash and remounted the LaCie. I then turned Time Machine On and started a backup. The disk image reappeared and was loaded with all my backup.
Questions:
1. What is a “.sparsebundle”? Did Time Machine create the folder on the LaCie?
2. Could I move the files put on disk image to the LaCie without messing up the backup process? Could they be recovered if necessary?
3. Can anyone explain what happened when I went through the procedure described above?
- MacVet123

A sparsebundle is a 'bundle' ( that is, a folder which looks like a single file-- iPhoto library, and even Applications themselves are bundles ) which is a disk image . That is how TM backs up across AirDisk. It's not the same backup mechanism as if the disk were used locally. I can't help you past there but hope it works for you, I'm still not to that point yet.

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