I'm considering adding an external hard drive to my AEBS for use exclusively as a Time Machine drive for two MacBooks. I see references to the fact that the drive must be mounted in Finder for this to work. What happens when you take the laptop away from the network for a while then bring it back? Do you get one of those messages telling you you should have dismounted the drive first? Will it re-mount automatically when it's back in the network?
I also saw in another thread that some hard drives will power up and down automatically as needed. Can anyone confirm this and advise as to which ones do and is this as good an idea as it seems?
Guys, you are all being way too ridiculous about this.
Apple WANTS THIS TO WORK PROPERLY, and therefore (unless you encounter a bug) IT DOES WORK PROPERLY.
(a) Format a drive as JHFS+.
(b) Connect it to your network in some fashion. It can be connected to some other mac and shared. It can be connected to an Airport Base Station with USB. Whatever.
(c) On your mac that you want to back up, mount the drive of interest. If it's connected to a base station, you will see the base station in the list of computers that are offering file sharing. Choose it, and click on the drive of interest.
(d) Tell Time Machine on the source mac to use this remote drive for backups.
(e) After this, things will just work.
In particular:
- when a backup needs to happen, the remote drive will be mounted, will be backed up to, and will be unmounted. No passwords or anything else, it will just happen automatically. Likewise if you shut down the portable or put it to sleep during a backup, the right thing will happen --- the remote drive will be unmounted, then remounted and the backup continue when the machine wakes up.
- a network backup (for various good reasons) is constructed using a "fake file system" on the remote drive, not the "raw" file system. What this means, practically, is that when you use Finder to look at a time machine backup connected via USB, you see a whole bunch of files representing all the backed up files. When you look at a time machine backup made over the network, you see a single very large file called backupname.sparsebundle.
(If you need to look inside this file, double click, and wait a while for it to "open"). THIS, not any evil or stupidity on Apple's part, is why you can't do an initial backup using USB or firewire, then connect the backup drive to the network.
- I don't know about the most recent AEBS, but the previous generation (and presumably even earlier) utilize truly crappy USB technology, technology so bad you wonder where Apple got it from, which gives the USB connection to the drive a speed of around 6 MB/s (maybe 8MB/s for short bursts). Given how pathetically slow this is, it doesn't much matter whether you run the first back up over wireless or ethernet --- it's going to take a day or more either way.
[I've no idea if Time Capsule has a faster connection to disk, so that it can connect to disk at wire speed --- say 60MB/s+ over gig ethernet.
I imagine that if you used for network backups a disk connected to a mac, you would get performance closer to what you would hope for --- the minimum of what the disk itself or the network connection deliver ---- but for various reasons related to saving energy and suchlike, I did not adopt that configuration for my MacBook Air backup --- backing up at 6MB/s over wireless works acceptably for me, for the low data volumes involved.]
