GeoffSteffens.com

Time Machine + Airport Extreme + External drive = works

There’s nothing like the near loss of a program’s source code to scare you into reviewing your backup solution.  A few months back, I virtualized one of my dev PC’s to free up some hardware.  Without realizing it, this compromised the machines backup procedure (drive to drive backups).  This is pretty useless when you corrupt the VM image as I did - all the backups are inside of it.

Thankfully I was able to get the VM back online but it sure motivated me to review the my backup routines.  Turns out setting up a single mac+pc solution was easier than I expected.

Because I have a growing mix of mac & PC hardware, I really wanted to centralize all backups onto one giant NAS. Since we have an Airport Extreme, I figured why not use it’s ability to turn USB drive’s into a NAS.

Logically you would expect a Macbook Pro, Apple’s Airport Extreme and Time Machine to all Just Work(tm).  According to Apple’s website it doesn’t. Google turned up lots of conflicting info about whether it does/doesn’t work but in my experience it is possible without any dodgy hacks.  Here’s the steps I went thru to get everything going for both mac & PC, hopefully it saves someone else some time:

1. Update Airport Extreme with latest firmware (important)
2. Update Mac with latest patches (I’m using Lepoard but I imagine snow lepord works too)
3. Attach your USB drive to the Mac and use Disk Utility to format using HFS+ Journaled then dismount it (this is important also)
4. Attach USB drive to Airport Extreme
5. Run Airport Extreme configuration on Mac, walk thru the setup wizard - it should detect the disk automatically
6. Start Time Machine, click Select Disk, the newly attached drive should appear. OK your way out of the dialogs and the Mac side is done.
7. Install the PC version of Airport Extreme software on each PC you want to access the shared drive from
8. Reboot - the shared disk will be mounted for you as the next available drive letter

Windows doesn’t care that the disk is actually in HFS+ format - the Airport exposes it as a UNC share so everything is hunky dory.

I then just directed each Windows box to backup to the UNC share and hey presto, Windows and Mac both backing up to the one NAS (which in my case is a giant multi terabyte RAID-1 array with a USB interface.. mmm nerdy).

Hope this helps anyone out there looking for a mac+pc backup solution.