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Airport Extreme Issues

A

AlexGyani

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 2, 2011
10
0
Hi all,

I have just bought a 4th gen airport extreme and am trying to set up Time Machine by plugging in an external hard drive. I can see the drive and Time Machine can also set it up as my Back up drive, however, when I try to back up I receive this error message:


Does anyone know how I can fix this? I bought the airport extreme to set up a time machine and this is really annoying me.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give.

Alex
 

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Cheers, I did this, and that worked perfectly, but when I plugged it into my Airport it did not work.
 
John T said:
Time Machine is not recommended via Airport.
Click to expand...

Says who? I just purchased Airport Extreme and connected my backup harddrive. The mac sees it perfectly and backsup perfectly so far. If not recommended, why does the Time Machine see and accept the external hard drive connected to the Airport Extreme?

This is not bashing if it sounds like one :). I really am curious who says TM is not recommended. Is it Apple?
 
what you have to do is plug the external into the mac, format it as new, then plug it into the AEBS. once the mac sees the disc ont he network, you enter time machine preferences, and select the network disc as the back up location. this set up has been working fine for me for at least a few months now.

what apple refers to as "AirPort Disc" is different from the networked storage that gets configured for time machine. when my time machine performs its backup to the network disc, it actually shows as a "Time Capsule" disc on my desktop.
 
Would like to share my experience of using Airport extreme with external disc it might help you make a decision. I have experience nothing but trouble with this configuration and in fact it is true that Apple does not recommend it.

What happens in my case is that the first backup works flawlessly. However, eventually after a couple of days the regular hourly backup fail. While I am not 100 percent sure of this it seems to be a power management issue. The disk spins down and parks and Time machine does not see it and fails. If I switch the disk off and on then TM sees it again but then generates an error saying that "The identify of the disk has changed" it then starts a completely new backup ignoring the previous backup.

One suggestion I have seen to overcome this is to prevent TM doing the Hourly backup by switching it off and only do manual backups of TM when you have first checked that the disc is available and writable.

This problem is probably related to the type of disk that is used and if or how the power management works.

I have given up on using the airport Disk as a TM solution.
 
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TM backup to a HD connected to an Airport Extreme is not officially supported by Apple
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
 
I have been using a 2.5" drive in a case, so if the power management is key, that may be the issue.
 
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