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2nd reformat necessary when plugging USB drive into airport express?

M

macbook123

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 11, 2006
1,869
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At the risk that this has been sorted out in previous forums, I'm posting it (again) here.

I've been using a 500GB Western Digital USB drive for time machine before getting the Airport express, but now that I have the latter, would like to do wireless backups. It wasn't clear to me from the posts in various forums whether I have to reformat the drive even in this case, which would suck because I'd have to find temporary storage room for all the data. The drive doesn't appear in the finder at present, and is not visible to Time Machine.

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.

PS: Also, since I'd like to both print and backup wirelessly, I need some USB hub solution I guess. Any recommendations for products?
 
Airport Express does not support a USB Drive. The USB port is only for Wireless Printer Sharing
 
Printing Only

AE = Airport Express

Printing and USB Hard Drive support

AEBS = Airport Extreme Base Station
or
Airport Extreme.

(in case the acronyms confused you)
 
Ahhh, sorry, thanks for the clarification and sorry for my stupidity...

I didn't know there were two different devices. The Extreme looked too much like the time capsule to me.

Thanks all!!
 
Well, I'm going to return my AExpress today, for the AExtreme. Can people let me know whether that will work immediately with my pre-formatted USB drive, that I've been using via plugin USB?
 
macbook123 said:
Well, I'm going to return my AExpress today, for the AExtreme. Can people let me know whether that will work immediately with my pre-formatted USB drive, that I've been using via plugin USB?
Click to expand...

It should, assuming it's formated HFS+. I think it works with FAT32 but from what I've read online it's prone to errors and slower than HFS+. Be warned, you WILL have to create an entirely new backup though. Time Machine backs up differently to network drives than to drives connected directly to the computer (sparsebundle vs direct copy if I understand correctly). And another note, I've read online that Apple doesn't officially support Time Machine backups using Airdisk and AEBS. It will work, but if it goes wrong, no support from Apple...
 
skorpien said:
It should, assuming it's formated HFS+. I think it works with FAT32 but from what I've read online it's prone to errors and slower than HFS+. Be warned, you WILL have to create an entirely new backup though. Time Machine backs up differently to network drives than to drives connected directly to the computer (sparsebundle vs direct copy if I understand correctly). And another note, I've read online that Apple doesn't officially support Time Machine backups using Airdisk and AEBS. It will work, but if it goes wrong, no support from Apple...
Click to expand...

Thanks. By "Airdisk" do you mean any external USB drive, or is this a special product name that I can't seem to find online?
 
macbook123 said:
Thanks. By "Airdisk" do you mean any external USB drive, or is this a special product name that I can't seem to find online?
Click to expand...

Oh sorry, didn't mean to confuse you. Yeah, Airdisk is just the term coined for attaching a USB drive to the AEBS and using it as a network drive.
 
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