Migrating Backup to Airport Extreme

[henryarcher]

Hi

I have just purchased an airport extreme base station so I can have access to my USB hard drives anywhere. I thought long and hard about getting a Time Capsule because I want to use the airport for backups, but because I wanted to plug other hard drive in too, I decided It would be cheaper to just use a mini USB hub instead.

I use one of these hard drives as a backup with Time Machine and i am having a problem. Time machine is recognising my original USB Time Machine Hard drive through the airport, and would backup to it, but there is not enough space. It is insisting that it needs to do an entire system backup rather than just backup the amended files!

Is there anyway to solve this without deleting all the previous backups? I Am not always going to be able to take my airport extreme with me when I want to do a backup, and I really dont want to have to be deleting all of the backups every time I do a backup direct to Hard drive or through Airport.

I hope someone can help

Many Thanks

H

 

[skorpien]

Hi henryarcher,

Time Machine backs up to networked drives differently than to drives connected directly. With networked drives it creates a .sparsebundle file, and with a drive connected directly it copies the files over. As far as I know, there is no easy way to let Time Machine continue backups to a USB drive when switched over to the Extreme or Time Capsule. This following link provides instructions on how to do what it is you wish to do, but requires enough hard disk space to be able to create the .sparsebundle file initially before moving it over.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2316069&tstart=0

PS - May I suggest changing the title of your post? AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express are two different products and AirDisk will not work with Express, leading to confusion.