Comments on: UPDATED: Apple refuses to support Airport Extreme USB Time Machine back-up feature

By: Christian Funk

Christian Funk — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:16:50 +0000

I have the setup AP Extreme with external USB HDD running quite stable. No errors so far. However, I’d be VERY interested what the fsck command was, that Micah used, just in case…

By: Micah

Micah — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:09:04 +0000

I found out the hard way that Time Machine over Airdisk is terribly unreliable. My Mac’s HD failed, and the Airdisk backup image file was corrupted.

After hours of looking for fixes, I was finally able to find a fsck command to run on the sparsebundle that rebuilt the catalog inside of the image.

Needless to say, I’ll only be using a directly-connected USB drive from now on.

By: Steve Mayer

Steve Mayer — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:02:41 +0000

Actually have been using this since they enabled the support and haven’t had a single issue. It’s actually been working exactly as you’d want it to for me at least.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:40:19 +0000

I semi agree with what the tech support agent said, but his reasons don’t make sense, because Apple supports these externals via direct connection. I highly doubt making it accessible via Airport Extreme would make certain drives work erratically.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:09:19 +0000

Article has been updated with a statement from Apple support.

By: Simon D

Simon D — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:05:57 +0000

I’m using it and it works pretty well so far. Occasionally, I get an error message that pops up, but then the next backup completes successfully. I think it a problem with being able to mount the drive everytime. It would be nice if they just went ahead and fully supported it.

By: Guido

Guido — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:01:23 +0000

Supporting Apple, you can’t find any information about time machine functionality on the Airport Extreme product site and at the support page for the Airport Extreme (troubleshooting issues). So it’s clear to me that this functionality is not fully supported.

By: Guido

Guido — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:54:07 +0000

Where’s the official statement (document) from apple?
I can’t find anything linking to that at Tidbits..

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:48:04 +0000

@chmood

sigh.

Apple has officially stated that they will not and do not support the Airport Extreme USB external hard drive feature of the latest update.

They were asked to support it – and they have refused to do so.

How is that inaccurate?

By: chmood

chmood — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:05:58 +0000

Your article does not support your headline: “Apple refuses to support” is not an accurate characterization of Apple’s position, nor is it an accurate summation of your article. It suggests, instead, ignorant teen-age bombast & conflation.

Thanks for the warning: no more page-hits from me!

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:47:11 +0000

Yea they really need to just support it upfront instead of trying to cripple it to sell Time Capsules. Time Capsule is a nice idea and all but I don’t use a prebuilt enclosure for any of my drives, I want to be able to take my drive out with ease and replace it if I want. I haven’t used this myself as I only have iMacs but if I was to get a laptop I would definitely want the ability to backup wirelessly.