Time Machine, Airport Express, and USB Drive
When Apple released Leopard and its new Time Machine feature, rumor said Time Machine would work across a network, backing up your Mac to a network drive. Users quickly realized that the promise wasn’t made to come true, and there was much consternation in the Mac community. This year, though, after Apple released its Airport Express spin-off known as Time Capsule, a combination of an Airport Express Base Station and an internal (network) hard drive, the capability that had been promised with the release of the “n” models base stations, showed up for us everyday Airport Extreme base station owners. Last week, I decided to put the capability to the test.
The real reason I decided to do it was not that I wanted to write about it but because I needed some kind of setup that was invisible to my wife. I had rigged a Western Digital 320GB hard drive with a Firewire 400 interface for Time Machine’s use, but she still had to turn it on in addition to turning on her iMac, and that was not within her normal habits. Of course, I could have just left the hard drive on all the time, but I didn’t want to do that because of the wear on the drive, the extra energy usage, and the small risk of fire. I decided to set up Time Machine using that same drive but hooked into our Airport Extreme Base Station via its USB port.
In the past, when I had tried to substitute a new drive into a Time Machine setup, I had never been successful. Instead, I always have been forced to wipe out the old Time Machine backup and restart a whole new backup on the new drive. So, I started out her reconfiguration by reformatting the drive before installing it on the network by plugging into our Airport Express Base Station. Once that was done, I mounted the disk on her iMac over the wireless part of our network (which is a “N” network but her machine only has a “G” networking card.) and told Time Machine to use the network disk as the backup device. I then commanded Time Machine to “Back Up Now” and instructed my wife not to turn off her iMac or the network set-up until Time Machine was done. While I don’t know exactly how long it took to back up her 160GB of data, applications, and operating system files, it was almost 24 hours before the dialog box of the backup disappeared. She had used the machine unfettered in the meantime while the whole thing had run quietly in the background.
Backups only take a short time now, but the sluggishness of this set-up makes me hope I never had to do a full restore from it. If I do, I will be hooking the Time Machine disk to her iMac via a direct Ethernet connection or Firewire, if that didn’t work, and hope I could bring everything back in a short period of time.
The real reason I decided to do it was not that I wanted to write about it but because I needed some kind of setup that was invisible to my wife. I had rigged a Western Digital 320GB hard drive with a Firewire 400 interface for Time Machine’s use, but she still had to turn it on in addition to turning on her iMac, and that was not within her normal habits. Of course, I could have just left the hard drive on all the time, but I didn’t want to do that because of the wear on the drive, the extra energy usage, and the small risk of fire. I decided to set up Time Machine using that same drive but hooked into our Airport Extreme Base Station via its USB port.
In the past, when I had tried to substitute a new drive into a Time Machine setup, I had never been successful. Instead, I always have been forced to wipe out the old Time Machine backup and restart a whole new backup on the new drive. So, I started out her reconfiguration by reformatting the drive before installing it on the network by plugging into our Airport Express Base Station. Once that was done, I mounted the disk on her iMac over the wireless part of our network (which is a “N” network but her machine only has a “G” networking card.) and told Time Machine to use the network disk as the backup device. I then commanded Time Machine to “Back Up Now” and instructed my wife not to turn off her iMac or the network set-up until Time Machine was done. While I don’t know exactly how long it took to back up her 160GB of data, applications, and operating system files, it was almost 24 hours before the dialog box of the backup disappeared. She had used the machine unfettered in the meantime while the whole thing had run quietly in the background.
Backups only take a short time now, but the sluggishness of this set-up makes me hope I never had to do a full restore from it. If I do, I will be hooking the Time Machine disk to her iMac via a direct Ethernet connection or Firewire, if that didn’t work, and hope I could bring everything back in a short period of time.
posted by Andy Foster at
8:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home