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Time Capsule vs. Airport Extreme w/ External Drive

C

chriswheat

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 26, 2007
249
0
My setup at home is an Airport Extreme with External Hard drive that I'm using for Time Machine.

A friend has asked me to help setup a backup solution for him. I think that duplicating my setup is the best idea, but wanted to check around to make sure I wasn't making a mistake.

Is backup through the Time Capsule any faster than through a combination of Airport Extreme with USB External Drive?

My setup has been great, but are there any other considerations I should make? Reliability?

What is the maximum size HD that the Airport Extreme can support?
 
Quick question, I have heard that Apple does not support using an Airport Extreme with an external drive for Time Machine. I am thinking of doing what your doing but just curious if that is easy to set up or if you have to do some weird work arounds?
 
benhollberg said:
Quick question, I have heard that Apple does not support using an Airport Extreme with an external drive for Time Machine. I am thinking of doing what your doing but just curious if that is easy to set up or if you have to do some weird work arounds?
Click to expand...

Not true. Time Machine works with any external HDD, either directly or network attached, as long as it's Mac compatible. You can save some time by getting one that is Mac ready, i.e. it's good to go out of the box so you don't have to reformat it for Mac usage.
 
benhollberg said:
Quick question, I have heard that Apple does not support using an Airport Extreme with an external drive for Time Machine. I am thinking of doing what your doing but just curious if that is easy to set up or if you have to do some weird work arounds?
Click to expand...

they used not to, but they do now.
 
rayward said:
Not true. Time Machine works with any external HDD, either directly or network attached, as long as it's Mac compatible. You can save some time by getting one that is Mac ready, i.e. it's good to go out of the box so you don't have to reformat it for Mac usage.
Click to expand...

Do you have any suggestions for good and fairly reasonable priced hard drives that are Mac ready around 1 TB?
 
I have a MacBookPro and a Western ShareSpace. The WD is link to my router FreeBox. The network is WIFI by the freebox.
I can't see the WD in Time Machine and/or Time capsule. Why ?
I see the WD in Finder. I use for the moment the software of WD ( WD Anywhere Backup ) that is OK. But I would like to test Time Machine.
 
benhollberg said:
Do you have any suggestions for good and fairly reasonable priced hard drives that are Mac ready around 1 TB?
Click to expand...

the drive doesnt need to be "mac-ready". just plug it into your mac, open disc utility, format for mac, plug it into your AEBS wait for it to be recognised, open time machine preferences, select your airport disc, and go! the hardest part will be waiting for the first back up to complete. i set mine up, and let it do the first back up over night.
 
njaremka said:
the drive doesnt need to be "mac-ready". just plug it into your mac, open disc utility, format for mac, plug it into your AEBS wait for it to be recognised, open time machine preferences, select your airport disc, and go! the hardest part will be waiting for the first back up to complete. i set mine up, and let it do the first back up over night.
Click to expand...

It's a good idea to connect to the AEBS with an Ethernet cable for the initial backup.
 
OllyW said:
It's a good idea to connect to the AEBS with an Ethernet cable for the initial backup.
Click to expand...

yeah, i guess that might have been quicker :p oh well, i got it done and out of the way. now, all my time machine updates are seemless. its much nicer than having to remember to plug in my external hard drive to the MBP every couple of days.
 
jbranchu said:
I have a MacBookPro and a Western ShareSpace. The WD is link to my router FreeBox. The network is WIFI by the freebox.
I can't see the WD in Time Machine and/or Time capsule. Why ?
I see the WD in Finder. I use for the moment the software of WD ( WD Anywhere Backup ) that is OK. But I would like to test Time Machine.
Click to expand...


It's a shame you've had so many replies, but for posts from november, that people don't seem to have noticed.

Btw I dont think you can use external drives (air drives?) for time machine backup over the network. Or if you can they are unreliable.

I'm still trying to sus out how to access my airdrive (connected to my airport extreme) over the internet. Although I believe my issue is because I have a standard router, wirelessly connected to the extreme.
 
OllyW said:
Yes, I'm using a bog standard 1TB WD My Book USB drive plugged into my AEBS. There are loads of people on here who are using a similar set up without any problems.
Click to expand...


Same here, I have 2 x 1TB drives hanging off my airport extreme both working flawlessly.

One for time machine and one for other backups of things like itunes and lightroom masters etc
 
mattpreston11 said:
Haha! does it work flawlessly? Airport extreme with extra drive?
Click to expand...

I am one with a WD drive hooked up through AEBS and it doesn't work flawlessly for me. Twice TM has claimed that my backup is corrupted and needs to redo it. The TM process worked for, I'd say an average of 4-5 days before the corruption issue would pop-up.

The odd thing is that I can easily access anything on that drive through the Time Machine interface both times...even right now, but it will not longer utilize/recognize that drive to perform the backup. :(

I have not redone the backup in 2 months, just kept it as-is. I am off from work next week, perhaps I will reformat and try once more. :(

(It's my wife's computer and she does work almost exclusively online, so the 2-month-old backup is reasonable for us at this point.)
 
mstrze said:
I am one with a WD drive hooked up through AEBS and it doesn't work flawlessly for me. Twice TM has claimed that my backup is corrupted and needs to redo it. The TM process worked for, I'd say an average of 4-5 days before the corruption issue would pop-up.

The odd thing is that I can easily access anything on that drive through the Time Machine interface both times...even right now, but it will not longer utilize/recognize that drive to perform the backup. :(

I have not redone the backup in 2 months, just kept it as-is. I am off from work next week, perhaps I will reformat and try once more. :(

(It's my wife's computer and she does work almost exclusively online, so the 2-month-old backup is reasonable for us at this point.)
Click to expand...

anybody got internet access to the drive working correctly? either using the mobile me method or otherwise?
 
mattpreston11 said:
anybody got internet access to the drive working correctly? either using the mobile me method or otherwise?
Click to expand...

I don't understand the question.

My wife's laptop certainly has internet access through the Airport Extreme. The drive is attached via USB to the AEBS and it's only visible on my home network. Mobile Me has nothing to do with it.
 
mstrze said:
I don't understand the question.

My wife's laptop certainly has internet access through the Airport Extreme. The drive is attached via USB to the AEBS and it's only visible on my home network. Mobile Me has nothing to do with it.
Click to expand...

What I meant,does the drive act similarly to a NAS? I want to access my drive from another network to get and upload files.

This is supported through mobile me, but not officially I don't think.
 
mattpreston11 said:
What I meant,does the drive act similarly to a NAS? I want to access my drive from another network to get and upload files.

This is supported through mobile me, but not officially I don't think.
Click to expand...

A drive hooked up to an AEBS will only be accessible on that network, not over the internet.
 
mstrze said:
A drive hooked up to an AEBS will only be accessible on that network, not over the internet.
Click to expand...


http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC340/AirPort-Extreme#overview


You can share an external USB hard drive over your wireless and wired networks by simply connecting it to the USB port on your AirPort Extreme Base Station. Called AirPort Disk, this feature is perfect for sharing files and more. If you’re a MobileMe member using a Mac with Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can even access the files on the drive over the Internet.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; nl-nl) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Apple doesn't officially support Time Machine backup to a HD connected to an Airport Extreme.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
 
Didn't know that about MobileMe...never had it AND it's going away anyhow, isn't it?
 
I'd like to test this out, but when I plug an external USB drive into my Airport Extreme, nothing happens. Should it appear on my sidebar in Finder (under "Devices") or do I need to access it some other way?
 
zen said:
I'd like to test this out, but when I plug an external USB drive into my Airport Extreme, nothing happens. Should it appear on my sidebar in Finder (under "Devices") or do I need to access it some other way?
Click to expand...

I think you would find it under Network.

In Time Machine, it would probably find it, and list it as a backup option for you.

I'm not in front of a Mac right now, so I cannot vouch for this.
 
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