Wireless NAS/TV, External Hard Drive

This is my first post, so thanks in advance for any help!
I have just purchased an MacBook Air 13", and am looking for some advice on home networking/external hard drives etc...
On my old Windows Laptop I would download a film using a Torrent, copy it to a flash USB stick, insert into TV, and then watch.
Now I would very much like to be able to do all of this wirelessly (if possible).
Ideally - I would like to be able to automatically save all of my downloaded films to a folder that isn't on my MBA, whether this is an external hard drive or Time Capsule etc etc. and then access that folder via my TV, so I don't have to do any transferring, moving, unplugging etc.
Is this possible?
I don't mind a USB cable going from the hard drive (or whatever) to the TV and this being permanently connected, I would just like to be able to download a film, it to be saved somewhere else not local to the MBA automatically without having to drag and drop it, and then accessed instantly on the TV, to confuse matters further my router (Tesco Broadband - Thompson) does not have any USB slots on it, only Ethernet.
Can anyone recommend a way of doing this (if possible)? And any products (Looking for about 1TB storage)
Thanks
Chris

billtils wrote:
ksimac, Bob T is the guru of this topic and I would not disagree with his advice, but, for the sake of completeness, I have to say that the path suggested to you will work. There are many of us who have gone for some version of that and we are very happy. The total cost will come in at less than the TC.
On the other hand, there are many, many others for whom it doesn't work at all, or, worse, works for a while, then suddenly the backups turn up corrupted with no warning. Sometimes they can be repaired with Disk Utility, sometimes with Disk Warrior, but usually the only option is to erase and start over.
In my case, it worked perfectly for about 3 months; then turned up corrupted every few days for a couple of weeks; then worked fine for several more months, and came up corrupted again just the other day. That's with exactly the same hardware in exactly the same location.
There are many, many threads in this forum (and the Leopard and Snow Leopard Time Machine forums) with similar scenarios.
And if there's a problem, you'll get no help from Apple, since it's +*not supported.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
As noted, if you still want to do this, by all means make regular secondary backups of some sort. Otherwise you may have no backups when you need them the most.
Also, there are several reports of premature expiration experiences of the TC.
Yes, some of the first generation Time Capsules (circa early 2008) had power supply problems; Apple replaces them at no charge: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3351
Recent models seem to be much better.

Similar Messages

Can I use Time Machine wirelessly to an external hard drive other than Time Capsule?

Since I already have a wireless router, I don't want to get Time Capsule. And since this is a laptop, I would prefer the external device *not* being physically connected to my MacBook Pro. Any suggestions on external hard drives and methods to accomplish this would be appreciated.
Chris

You can, in some cases.
If you have a desktop Mac, you can back up to a shared drive connected to it, over your network. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #22 for setup instructions.
Some NAS drives work with Time Machine, to one degree or another, but I don't recommend that -- there are too many possible downsides. See the pink box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #2.

Running Lightroom - NAS or external Hard drive?

I am a photographer currently running a windows laptop with LR and PS (CC) and using the internal hard drive on my Laptop to store all my images (24k of the blighters!).
I currently do all my editing on this laptop but it is starting to 'creak' under the weight of all those images. I have decided I want to move all the images off and on to a storage/backup configuration and use the internal hard drive of the laptop purely for processing power to drive photoshop and lightroom etc.
I have also recently bought a Mac desktop computer which I run from my upstairs home office/bedroom and have just installed LR/PS (CC) on it as well - but havent started using it yet!
I will probably do most of my editing on the MAC upstairs but there will also be occasion where I will want to use my laptop with Lightroom for when I do tethered photography shoots and to do a bit of editing when i'm away in hotels and occasionally when im being lazy and want to edit downstairs in my front room at home.
I have looked at the option of getting 2 external hard drives with an enclosure and plugging them into the back of the MAC (USB3) and using 'carbon copy clone' so the 2 disks are mirrored.
I would then use another external hardrive to plugin into the back of the enclosure to do a weekly backup (take this off site).
The only problem with this is that when I want to use my Laptop I have to take the hard drives out of the MAC and then plugin them
into the Laptop it in order to access the latest catalog and images? - and taking the hard drives and enclosure around with me kind of defeats the point of having the laptop?
So the options I have considered is to either:
Add a 'WD My Book' off the external hardrives so I can access the catalog/images wirelessly from the cloud from my laptop - but not sure how this would work and also
       how would the MAC get its latest catalog changes from the WD My Book (after I have made changes to the catalog when using the laptop)?
   2. The other option I recently looked at was the NAS route....which kind of makes sense as presumably there will only
       be one catalog residing on the NAS which I download to the either the Laptop or Mac depending on which I want to use
       and then access the images from the NAS when I do my editing. Presumabaly I then have to do some sort of synchronisation
       of the catalog when I have finished editing and move between the laptop and MAC?
The other question is how do I access the NAS? I dont currently have a home network. I do have a wireless
router in my front room downstairs from which I access broadband internet - I then use a repeater (poor signal) when im using the MAC in the office upstairs
- wouldnt accessing the NAS wirelessly be slow? (Dont really want to start using cables around the house)
Will there be probelms moving betweek Windows and Apple OS environments?
Any ideas or help with this would be hugley appreciated as my brain is starting to fry and I just want to get back to taking photographs :-) !!
Thanks in advance
Chris

If all you want to do on the laptop is a bit of editing and then print when you get home, the Smart Preview method described above will be fine.
There is no problem going from windows to mac.
The problem you might find is that when you come home from a job, you need to transfer the files to the external drive and then show LR on the mac where the files are...pretty easy but you have to remember to do it before you start mucking around.
The other solution that a FEW of us use, is to put the LR catalog files on Dropbox. This allows you to have the current catalog always on both computers. The only drawback I know of is that you absolutely must carefully let the machine update dropbox before you close it (or at least before you open the file on the other computer). If you do that and use smart preview, you will find you can do almost anything. Remember, you still need to get the files to the external drive when you get home (first step) and then use LR on the mac to "find folders"
If you DO want to ocassionally print from the laptop, you could carry a USB key with the original files copied to it from the external drive (I often take the last couple of months worth with me)...name the USB drive the same name as the external drive and LR will no know the difference...
It feels complicated at first, but once you get into the LR mindset it will work just fine.
Tom

Wireless Backup to External Hard Drive

Home network: iMac (Snow Leopard), Wireless Printer, Vigor 2800 Wireless Router, 2 Seagate USB Ext Hard Drives.
I wish to add Seagate hard drives to wireless network and use Time Machine for B/Up. They are currently wired directly to Mac.
I have tried PogoPlug but it doesn't support Time Machine. Someone suggested Airport Extreme as one solution even though I don't need a router / modem.
Would this be the best solution at economical cost?
If yes, would an older model of AE do the job?
Thanks

billtils wrote:
ksimac, Bob T is the guru of this topic and I would not disagree with his advice, but, for the sake of completeness, I have to say that the path suggested to you will work. There are many of us who have gone for some version of that and we are very happy. The total cost will come in at less than the TC.
On the other hand, there are many, many others for whom it doesn't work at all, or, worse, works for a while, then suddenly the backups turn up corrupted with no warning. Sometimes they can be repaired with Disk Utility, sometimes with Disk Warrior, but usually the only option is to erase and start over.
In my case, it worked perfectly for about 3 months; then turned up corrupted every few days for a couple of weeks; then worked fine for several more months, and came up corrupted again just the other day. That's with exactly the same hardware in exactly the same location.
There are many, many threads in this forum (and the Leopard and Snow Leopard Time Machine forums) with similar scenarios.
And if there's a problem, you'll get no help from Apple, since it's +*not supported.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
As noted, if you still want to do this, by all means make regular secondary backups of some sort. Otherwise you may have no backups when you need them the most.
Also, there are several reports of premature expiration experiences of the TC.
Yes, some of the first generation Time Capsules (circa early 2008) had power supply problems; Apple replaces them at no charge: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3351
Recent models seem to be much better.

Is it possible to use an external hard drive wirelessly w Leopard?

Upgrading to Leopard seems to have ruined my wireless home network, which worked very smoothly with Tiger. After a couple of tries, I was unable to connect wirelessly to my external hard drive (connected directly to Airport). I was then unable to even access the data directly. I am right now using Data Rescue II to see how much of the data on the hard drive can be retrieved.
I tried an old external HD with airport to see if that would work, and it failed also.
Is it even possible to set up a wireless network with Leopard that will let me move data to an external HD??
Any help is appreciated.
Message was edited by: Joe Mondo

I may have phrased my question poorly.
Pre-Leopard, my external HD was connected directly to Airport. I used it wirelessly.
When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard, it was almost impossible to access the HD wirelessly, and then outright impossible.
I tried the same setup with another external HD and that didn't work either. When I try to access the HD wirelessly, I get nowhere.

Using Time Capsule as an external hard drive?

A bought a 500GB TC back in May. It worked OK until September and then failed without warning. Unfortunately it took Apple a long time to get a replacement unit sent to me, by which time I'd already purchased a Netgear wireless router and external hard drive so I could at least check my emails and back up some important files!
I've finally had the replacement TC unit sent back to me after 4 weeks, but it's now surplus to requirements. Other than trying to sell it on eBay, I was wondering if it's possible to disable the wireless functionality and just hook it up to my iMac via a ethernet CAT6 patch cable to double up as a 500GB external hard drive?
I know I can run it as a wireless 'client' using the Netgear as my main router, but after trying a similar setup once before using a spare AEBS as a print server, I found that switching one of the wireless clients off when not in use would crash the wireless network.
Any ones thoughts?

use ethernet to connect to netgear, set up TC in bridge mode with wireless off. use airport utility to configure the TC hard drive and now you have a hard drive for your network.

New Imports to iPhoto Are Saving to My External Hard Drive

Recently purchased a Buffalo NAS 2TB external hard drive. I didn't realize at the time of purchase that Apple doesn't support NAS drives; although, I did find ChronoSync software that would allow me to back up my iMac to the Buffalo hard drive.
After a successful backup of music, documents, and photos, for some reason when I upload new pics they are now saved on the Buffalo external hard drive and NOT my iMac which is where they should be going. When setting up the backup to the Buffalo originally, I only selected the folders that I wanted to backup (music, photos, documents, and applications). I made sure I only wanted those backed up; there was no need to backup my entire internal hard drive.
When uploading new pics to iPhoto, I never selected anything to tell my iMac to save all new photos to the Buffalo external hard drive.
So now when I open iPhoto on my iMac, it winds up missing three or four event folders that I recently uploaded (Christmas pics, etc) but when I open the "iPhoto Library" icon on my Buffalo hard drive, it shows everything (even the three or four event folders that my iMac "iPhoto Library" is missing).
Any thoughts of what the problem is? When backing up my iMac, all I wanted to do was save my already existing pictures to an external hard drive. What I didn't want is for the Buffalo hard drive to "save" the entire iPhoto application (which is what I think it did).
With all the problems I've been having with this NAS hard drive, I've since purchased a non-NAS hard drive and will be using Time Machine from here on out! The things you learn......
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks in advance! Happy New Year!
Gtrcoop

iPhoto saves the files to the default Library when you import, and the default library is the last one opened.
IF the one on your iMac is the default library and the files are turning up on the back up, the likely candidate for responsibility is the back up app, I'm afraid. I'd check the settings on that.
Regards
TD

Airport extreme working with external hard drive via USB port adaptor :)

Hi Everyone. I hope this post will be helpful because I have been very frustrated with apple and their customer support and I figured this out on my own by reading all of the discussions and playing with my settings but it took me a while...
I recently for school bought all apple products and I have non-mac products as well. I bought the airport extreme believing I could hook up all of my computers through it and share the printers and my mybook external hard drive with my husbands desktop and the other lap tops. Unfortunately this was not as easy as advertised...
I was not able to successfully have both computers stay connected to the printers so I have to have mine for my laptop connected via the airport extreme and my husband has his desktop connected to a different printer via a ethernet cable. It would work at set up and then a few hours later not print anymore and reinstalling the drivers just confused it... if anyone knows a solution for this please let me know. It worked wirelessly for me but not for him.
As far as the external drive for the airport extreme goes I went and bought an additional USB port hub so I could access my printer wirelessly and my external hard drive as well for time machine back ups.
I set up my external hard drive so that it will save files from both a mac and a non-mac computer and we can both access it (not sure if that matters in the solution or problem for others); however, the desktop (non-mac) was able to by clicking and dragging files to it assess the hard drive and utilize it and my macbook was not able to because the airport extreme showed the drive under disks but when I tried to access it through time machine it was not there. I played with this for a long time and finally figured it out.
I believe I went under finder, then chose go from the menu bar, then chose connect to server and the default for it is afp://10.0.1.1.. You enter this in under server address and you may be prompted to give your password. The password was tricky as well because it showed my computers user name and I thought it would want that password but instead it wanted the password to log into my internet or my airport extreme's password. Once I put this in I was able to open my time machine preferences, finally choose the mybook external hard drive that was now showing up, choose it and my computer is currently doing a back up as I type without the error message of failed, unable to locate volume, or any others.
Hope this posting was helpful and not to confusing and feel free to message me if you need clarification and think this may solve your problem as well. GOOD LUCK!

Seems to me you should have done your homework setting up your network and not assuming that any third party device you choose to use would work without problems.

Airport Express to printer AND external hard drive?

Does anyone know if it's possible to split the usb port on the airport express, and backup wirelessly to an external hard drive, AND print wirelessly to a printer? Thanks!

Welcome to the discussion area, cwugigi!
+Does anyone know if it's possible to split the usb port on the airport express, and backup wirelessly to an external hard drive, AND print wirelessly to a printer? Thanks!+
The AirPort Express does not support a hard drive at its USB port, so the answer would be no. This would be possible on an AirPort Extreme.
You could connect several compatible printers to the AirPort Express, if you used a powered USB hub.
Message was edited by: Bob Timmons

We have 3 MacBook Pros in our house, connected by a WiFi network. I am having troubles connecting an external hard drive thru our router, to make back ups of all three computers wirelessly.

I have purchased a 3rd party external hard drive to back up all three computers. I have done the intial back up by connecting each computer separately to the drive via USB. I was told at the Apple store where I purchased the drive, that I could then connect the hard drive to our router via the USB and then use Time Machine to back up the computers wirelessly. But I can't seem to figure out how to do that. I have connected the device to the router, but don't see it on Finder and when I check with Time Machine, it doesn't recognize any device. Help please!

First off your external drive must be formatted Mac Extened (Journaled) for it to work with Time Machine. As that is not a widely used format, the Apple Mac format, most routers do not support it so the router will not see it is even connected to the router. For the router to see the drive is must be formatted either FAT32 or on some routers they can see/read/write to the NTFS format. But if you kformat it like that then Time Machine will not backup to it.
About the only device that can be used for network backups of Mac computers is an Apple Time Capsule.
So you have 2 options.
1) Do all the backups by connecting that drive directly to each Mac.
2) Take it back and get a Refund then buy an Apple Time Capsule. And or some other Network Attached Storage device (a NAS) that cane be formatted Mac Extended (Journaled) and be seen on your LAN and that the Mac's can backup up to.
<Edited by Host>

Wireless Router with USB + External Hard Drive = Time Capsule?

So I bought a TP-Link WR710N wireless router http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?model=TL-WR710N which seems to support external storage in its USB port. I tried with various storage media and it kinda works. The bad thing is that it only sees NTFS drives. I tried an external hard drive formated for Windows and a USB stick, also formated for Windows and it discovered them. But when I tried my external hard drive which is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which I was using for Time Machine, it couldn't see it. Neither the TP-Link software, nor the Time Machine software.
Is there any way I could use this router with this hard drive for wireless backing up with Time Machine NOT buying extra equipment (NAS, AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule) ?
Thanks.

m3adi3c wrote:
Is there any way I could use this router with this hard drive for wireless backing up with Time Machine NOT buying extra equipment (NAS, AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule) ?
Thanks.
No
Take it back and get a Time Capsule or keep it and buy a regular external drive and connect it to the Mac directly.

What do I need to create a wireless external hard drive?

Here's the situation. Hubs and I have just combined households. Between us we have a Macbook Pro laptop (10.5.8. mine), an HP laptop (his), a westell router from century link and 3 external firewire/usb hardrves, one of which serves as my time capsule. We also have a wireless printer.
One of the external harddrives has my tv shows and movies, downloaded from itunes, stored temporarily since my mac is out of space. We'd like to be able to access our external harddrives wirelessly, so that I can move my itunes library and media files to one and access them wirelessly, have my time capsule hooked up permenantly, and so he could access his moies/shows/music on his external hard drive wirelessly.
What do I need to create a wireless hookup for my external hard drives that is compatible with macs and pcs, and is relatively easy to do (neither of us are particularly tech savvy, but with the right instructions we can do okay)

That router you have is really not a router. It is a DSL modem that does have rudimentary router with one port.
What you really need to do is set the westel into Bridged Ethernet mode, that disables the router function in it, and get yourself a good router that has a USB port to connect a USB drive or printer to it. there may be models that have more then one USB port so you could connect multiple devices to the router.
It isn't hard making these changes but i won't go into it here. For that go to DSLReports.com and look up your ISP and then the FAQs for your ISP. More then likely someone has posted detailed instruction on how to do what I described above for your model Westel modem and your ISP.
Or follow Csound1's link to a wireless NAS (Network Attached Storage).
Good Luck.

Can i use my time capsule to wirelessly backup my macbook and its external hard drive, which up until now was it's time machine and storage? How?

Can i use my time capsule to wirelessly backup my macbook and its external hard drive, which up until now was it's time machine and storage? How?

The external drive must be connected to the Mac using either USB or FireWire
You must remove the external hard drive from the list of items that are "excluded" from backups in Time Machine Preferences.
Here's how:
Open System Preferences (gear icon on the dock)
Open Time Machine
Click Options
Look for the name of the hard drive in the list of "excluded" items and click on it to highlight it
Click the -- (minus) button at the bottom of the list to remove the hard drive from the list of "excluded" items....so it will now be backed up
Strongly recommend that you do the first backup using Ethenret from your computer to the Time Capsule since the entire contents of the external drive will be copied on the first pass. Ethernet will be 3-5 faster than wireless.
Once you have the first backup done, you can use wireless for subsequent backups since they will nornally be much smaller....unless you add large files to the external drive.

I use My Time Capsule as a external hard drive, can I transfer files other than wirelessly?

I use My Time Capsule as a external hard drive, can I transfer files other than wirelessly?

will TC appear on My desk top?
It will, if you do the following:
Open Macintosh HD and locate the Time Capsule icon under the SHARED heading on the left side of he window.
Click on the Time Capsule icon and a folder representing the drive will appear to the right
Double click the folder and the drive icon will appear on the desktop

How do (or can) I use my new time capsule as a wireless external hard drive?

I want to access my time capsule as an external hard drive, both from two Macbooks (on is a Macbook Pro, the other regular), as wall as two PC's that are both on the wireless network in my home. How can I do this?

Click here and follow the instructions.
(59996)

Wireless NAS/TV, External Hard Drive

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