Use your Airport Extreme as a Time Capsule

Category: Apple | 1 Comment | 1st February 2008

UPDATE! Time machine is now officially supported on the Airport Extreme.

OK so, a little background... I bought my Airport Extreme base-station last year, shortly after jobs announced in the WWDC conference that Leopard's Time Machine feature could be used with a hard disk mounted on an Airport Extreme.

However, upon upgrading to Leopard, I discovered that this was simply not the case. A few months of confusion passed until the MacWorld Conference last month where Jobs announced a new product, the Time Capsule... This to me is exactly what I have already got, surely the Time Capsule is just a USB hard-disk hard wired to an Airport Extreme, in a new and slightly larger box.

The Airport Extreme can be used as a Time Capsule! Here's how!

1. Plug in a USB harddisk into the Airport Extreme.
2. Use 'Disk Utility' to format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This should only take a minute or so.
3. Once complete, open 'Terminal' type in the following:

   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

   
   This changes the setting that stops Time Machine from using your AirDisk.
4. Now open 'Time Machine' click 'Change Disk' or 'Add Disk' and hey presto, you can now see the previously hidden network disk!

I have been using this method for 2 weeks now and it does seem to work, occasionally it won't connect and I have to restart the base station. Let me know if you tried this and how well it works for you!

1 Comment so far...

MacUser
22.02.2008 / 11am

I have just ordered a Airport Extreme so will be trying this asap, i`ll post the results.

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