Using airport extreme with WD 2tb hard drive

So I dont want to pay someone to do this so I hope someone can help me out here. I have an IMAC with two macbook pro's in my house. I use the airport extreme and just bought a Mybook for the mac WD 2 TB hard drive. I have attach the hard drive to my extreme and it seems that the backup thru time machine work find but I cannot see the back up on the hard drive at all and sometimes I cannot access the drive and also I get an error that tiem machine couldn't back up. The intial backup did work though.
Now I want to be able to take all my movies, music, pictures and files off my imac and macbook pro's and keep on the hard drive. I than would like to be able to access the files at anytime with any computer in the house and to also be able to stream my music and movies to my apple tv. Yes I know that I must have itunes running to stream my music and movies to my apple tv.
I am clueless on how to do this. I bought the HDD to be able to free up the space on my IMAC and macbook pro's. I also would like to be able to manually tell the HDD when I want to backup the files and not on a time. So how can I do all this stuff. I have over 200gb of pictures and 200gb of movies and music that need to get off my computer onto the HDD soon before the wife get mad at me. We bought this to do this and we are goign crazy on how to do it.

I have attach the hard drive to my extreme and it seems that the backup thru time machine work find but I cannot see the back up on the hard drive at all and sometimes I cannot access the drive and also I get an error that tiem machine couldn't back up. The intial backup did work though.
Apple does not support Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme. However, this does seem to work for some users while some users have some success and some have no success.
The bottom line is that this is not a reliable method to protect your important data, so if you want to continue to try this, it might be a good idea to have a secondary backup plan in place in case you cannot access your Time Machine backups when you need them most.
Now I want to be able to take all my movies, music, pictures and files off my imac and macbook pro's and keep on the hard drive.
If you do this, you are moving the "original" media libraries to the drive at the AirPort Extreme....and you will have no backups when...not if...the hard drive has a problem.
Surely, you plan to have backups of the media libraries, correct? Where will the additional drive needed for the backups reside on your network?

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Hello All,
Thank you ahead of time for your help! I have a couple of questions regarding the set up of my airport extreme and an external hard drive.
What I want to accomplish is using the airport extreme to ONLY share a hard drive for backup and sharing other files through out the house. My housemates already have the internet going through their router, so there is for the airport extreme. Can a macbook pro (13in intel) receive two wireless signals, one that is the internet and the other from my airport extreme (that shares my hard drive)? If so, how is this done?
Any assistance would be more that appreciated!!
Thanks!!

Hello njoza. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
The simplest way to accomplish this would be to connect the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) to the Internet router by Ethernet; reconfigure the AEBSn as a bridge, and disable its wireless radios.
In this configuration, you can still share out the hard drive and only need to connect to the Internet router's wireless network for both drive & Internet access.

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I'm wondering if anyone else has any kind of a similar experience? It appears that I can stream music and video from the drive easily enough, it's the writing to the drive that seems to be the issue. Thanks in advance...
Best Regards,
Jeff

I would think you would have better luck formatting it as HFS+ (Macintosh Extended File System). You'll still be able to see it from your non-Mac PCs.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6370006#6370006

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JohnHusk wrote:
Ok, Kappy answered some questions I had about how Time Machine works with an external hard drive.
After doing more reading about Time Machine, I found out that a person can, for example, leave the drive powered-off for a couple of weeks and only periodically or intermittently use Time Machine for back up.
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Worse, after an extended period, Time Machine may do a new, full backup of your entire system, rapidly filling-up your TM drive.
If that's the way you want to back up, Time Machine is not the backup app for you. One of it's main features is the way it can do quick hourly backups of what's changed, so you have an excellent chance of recovering a previous version (or versions) when you change or delete something in error, or a file comes up corrupted, or your Mac fails.
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I have connected a hard drive to my airport extreme.
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In the Description box, type a descriptive name like "AirPort Disk File Sharing," and then, click Done.
Click on Update.
To connect to the shared AirPort Disk from a remote location using a Mac:
From the Finder > Go > Connect to Server.
Enter the Pubic (WAN-side) IP address of the AEBSn, followed by a colon and the Public port number that you choose in step 11 of the previous procedure. For example: afp://www.mydyndnsdomain.com:8888 or afp://123.456.789.123:8888
Click Connect.
You should be prompted for your user name and password. The user name can be anything you like; the password should be the Disk password for the AEBSn that you created in step 6 previously.
Click Connect.

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I suggest you post this issue on the iTunes forum. You will have an audience that is oriented specifically towards this application.
Ciao.

Using airport extreme with WD 2tb hard drive

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