Netgear R7000 or Asus RT-AC68U with USB 3.0 hard drive as time machine

[ohsnapimaninja]

Hey guys!

I've been doing some research and I'm not a 100% that this will work. Numerous reviews state that the AirPort Extreme is not the best AC router out there, so I figured getting the Netgear or Asus might be a better idea. Having said that, is it possible to connect a USB drive to it and make the whole setup act like a time capsule?

I know the netgear supports writing to HFS drives, not to certain about asus.

Thanks!

 

[mfram]

If you are trying to use Time Machine over a network, then the on-disk filesystem of the drive is no longer relevant. The only thing that's relevant is the network protocol used to serve the drive. With Time Machine, only AFP is supported. So can the routers serve data with AFP?

If the routers only support SMB, then TM won't be in a supported configuration. You might be able to hack TM to back up to an SMB drive, but it's not clear to me the hacks will work when you want to restore. A backup system that can't restore is pretty much useless.

 

[ColdCase]

Time Machine will only work over the network reliably with apple approved devices. At the moment that limits you to a time capsule or AE+drive, both pretty good routers for the home.

You will see discussion about hanging a drive off a router or NAS, but many times the backups eventually get corrupted and are unusable. Some have not had issues.

If you want to backup to a drive hanging off a non apple router, I suggest you use something like Carbon Copy Cloner instead of time machine.

 

[Kartram]

I just did this stunt, AC68U (returned) - Netgear R7000 (returned) and finally settled on TC. I have a first gen TC too.