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Airport Extreme Time Machine Restore Question

philosopherdog

philosopherdog

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 29, 2008
802
652
Just connected a backup drive to my Airport Extreme. The initial backup is taking a long time. I have 360 gbs of data, no wonder. My concern is whether I have to use the network to restore my Time Machine if something went wrong or is it possible to plug the TM backup made over the network straight into a usb port?
 
Hmmm...good question. I know that in order to continue to do updates to the same set of backup files you need to host your drive in the same location...either via wifi network or attached directly. You can't flip-flop without creating a new backup file....won't recognize the previous.

BUT...since you are starting from scratch and the computer is looking for the backup, I would assume that ANY TM backup files would be read if the drive were connected directly.

I have no actual experience with this however.
 
Thanx for the reply. I'm getting extremely slow backup performance with an i7 mbp, but I tried the same thing on a recent entry level iMac and it worked quite well. Strange. Obviously it would be totally pointless to backup to the network drive if you had to restore from it. I don't have days to wait to restore. It would be cool if somebody knew the answer to this.

mstrze said:
Hmmm...good question. I know that in order to continue to do updates to the same set of backup files you need to host your drive in the same location...either via wifi network or attached directly. You can't flip-flop without creating a new backup file....won't recognize the previous.

BUT...since you are starting from scratch and the computer is looking for the backup, I would assume that ANY TM backup files would be read if the drive were connected directly.

I have no actual experience with this however.
Click to expand...
 
Ok. I found the answer. TM creates a file with a .sparsebundle extension. Once you install OS X on your downed machine, you can plug your TM backup disk that was sitting on your network drive into the usb port of your machine. You mount the .sparsebundle image by right clicking and using imagemounter or by using diskutility. And then start migration manager and you're off to the races. I must say the network TM backup is handy but a bit slow even on the latest hardware. BTW, here's a link to the thread I found on the topic link
 
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