if they get this working, for real... i would go out and buy a family license to leopard plus a new airport. i'm sure there are plenty of other laptop users out there that are in the same boat as me. backing up wirelessly (and hopefully guaranteed securely) each time i open my macbook pro would be awesome.

chaos421

via 9to5mac.com

Phobiac

@Phobiac:

This puts a whole new meaning to "It Just Works!"

With Time Machine, it doesn't just work. It takes 10 steps. For the average user, it's 10 tooooo many.

At least you figured out how to do it. Nice!

yoshi

I'm waiting until my wireless backups are protected with something more than WEP. It was a good call for them to disable it until a better encryption is set up.

WorkingOnYourInvoice

1) disconnect airport disk and plug into computer as a USB drive directly.
2) Set up time machine to use this volume.
3) In terminal cd to volume "cd /Volume/HDD"
4) In terminal "touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported" this will create an invisible file.
5) In terminal "sudo chown root:admin .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
6) In terminal "sudo chmod 1775 .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
7) In terminal "ls -l -a" the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t
8) eject disk, unplug from mac, plug into Airport.
9) mount at mac using connect to server in finder (command k) and afp://airportname.local./HDname
10) see if time machine now sees the drive and tries to use it.

Phobiac

@nocar:

Interesting idea...

yoshi

Now how about working on AirTunes support for the iPhone?

nocar

tar -czvf is your friend

vagrant

it works fine if you plug in your airport drive into your computer first then after it reads it as a time machine drive, plug it into your airport.
it just needs to set it up. seems to work fine for me in my airport extreme.

myneid

I am curious to know if this is truly a problem with Leopard or Airport. The reason is because I bought the new Airport when it was first released and accessing external hard drives was a big problem with them. I actually returned it before finding out if the problem was corrected.

yoshi

Have any of you tried to restore from the tricked out volume?

I thought the reason the feature was yanked was because Time Machine required a file system feature called hard-linking to work.

This is why it only works off a server is if the server is running Leopard or a different OS that supports hardlinking, not Tiger.

I'm sure an update to the Airport Extreme is on its way that supports this, then all will be well. But for now I wouldn't bet that the OS trick works correctly, even if it seems like it is. Never know exactly when that feature will be required.

So I may try the trick as I'm dying to use Airport for Time Machine, but I won't be fooling myself into thinking I'm actually backed up!

stwf

works for me via the method above.

Phobiac

I sure hope so. That was the only reason I wanted to upgrade to the new OS.
I also bought a new 500GB drive to back up to.
I'm not going take my MacBook all over house with 6 pound Hard Drive hanging from it.

I think this is ridiculous to have a delay like this especially after waiting 6 months originally.
This OS was supposed to be out in the Spring of 2007. They should have never released it if it was not finished.

More corporate crap! Getting out a product half ass just to make a buck for the holidays.

doinka

I'll stick to my FireWire drive. My little Netgear WGT624 is just fine as the internet-only doohicky.

Kaiser-Machead

The terminal commands don't work with the final release, they were for the last beta of leopard.

I tried the "connect to computer first" trick and while TM saw the drive over the network and tried to backup to it (having to start over from scratch btw, it did not see my previous backup), it would always hang halfway through and I'd have to restart my AEBS. I excluded system files and applications, getting the backup a lot smaller, and it still hung. On a fluke it finally completed its first backup, but when I tried to "travel through time" all it would show is the present state, no backups. I think it had something to do with the sparse image it backed everything up into.

So I just partitioned my macbook pro's drive so I could use TM, and I do nightly backups of my home folder using .Mac Backup to my airdisk. It's not ideal, but it's the best solution for me until they get FULL support for Airdisks in TM.

brandon2084

I was severely disappointed to have TimeMachine stop working in the final release, as it was gloriously backing up to a Netatalk share running on one of my Linux boxes under the previews.

However, after a lot of effort, I figured out how to get it to work.

1) Create a new, small partition on your hard drive (or just connect a USB drive), and name it what you want your share to be called.
2) Mount your share under a temporary, alternate name.
3) Configure TimeMachine to back up to the partition you created in step 1. Let it begin a backup, then cancel out of it, and turn TimeMachine off.
4) In the top level of the mounted disk, you will find (amongst other items), the above-mentioned .com.apple.timemachine.supported file, as well as a second dot-file named after your MAC address. Copy both of these to the top level of the network share.
5) Unmount the local hard drive. Remove it if it was a USB drive. If you created a partition on an internal drive, *delete it*.
6) Remount the network share under the original name -- the one that was on the physical disk. It is important that these be identical.
7) Turn TimeMachine on. It should begin backing up to the new share.

This still has the problem mentioned above of not being able to browse it directly from the TimeMachine client. However, if you right-click on the TimeMachine icon in the dock, you will see an option for "Browse an alternate TimeMachine disk." If you choose that, and select the .sparsebundle file on your network share, you will be able to fully browse your backups and restore in the expected way.

kaosfere