Time Machine does not work for 2 mac's (Airport Extreme)

[oyalhi]

I have just bought and setup Airport Extreme. From my main mac (os x lion), I can choose the external hdd as a Time Machine backup; however, the second mac (os x 10.5.8) does not list the airport extreme as an option to choose? What could be the reason, any ideas?

Thanks,

Omer

 

[Tomorrow]

Partition the drive, use one partition for each Mac?

 

[oyalhi]

The external HDD is connected to the Airport Extreme. When the Time Machine is run, I go to Seleck Disk and select the HDD connected to Airport Extreme. However, the second mac (which is os x 10.5.8) won't even show the airport extreme as an option to select. I can access airport extreme with the airport utility from both macs, so there are no connection issues.

I am not sure if HDD partition is the issue here.

 

[Tomorrow]

If you unplug the Time Machine drive from the Airport Express, then plug in a different (non-TM-formatted) drive into the Airport Express, can both Macs see it?

 

[oyalhi]

I found the problem. The second mac's finder was not showing Airport Extreme neither. However, there was an item named 'All...' under Shared. After clicking that AE appeared, after clicking that and entering the password, the HDD connected to the AE was accessible. From then on Time Machine DID list the external HDD connected to the AE as a backup disk.

Now that I've been reading thougn it seems Apple does not wants us to use Time Machine with external HDDs. This is very bad unfortunately; if I'd known this I would have bought Time Capsule instead of Airport Express. The only reason I didn't was because I already have external HDDs at home wanted to save some bucks.

However, what puzzles me is that, Time Capsule IS also a backup over wifi, which is essentially the same as having an AE with and HDD.

Well, will see how it goes.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Tomorrow]

Now that I've been reading thougn it seems Apple does not wants us to use Time Machine with external HDDs. This is very bad unfortunately; if I'd known this I would have bought Time Capsule instead of Airport Express.

Where'd you get that notion? I always thought an external HDD was the preferred volume for a TM backup. I've been using one for more than two years.

 

[oyalhi]

What I meant to say was:

Now that I've been reading though it seems Apple does not want us to use Time Machine to backup to Airport Extreme with external HDDs. This is very bad unfortunately; if I'd known this I would have bought Time Capsule instead of Airport Extreme.