- Best External Hard Drive For Airport Extreme Time
- Best Cheap External Hard Drives
- Best External Hard Drive For Airport Extreme Trucks
- Best External Hard Drive For Airport Extreme Parking
To use Time Machine to make a backup of your Mac, you need one of these types of storage devices:
Best External Hard Drive For Airport Extreme Time
How to connect an external hard drive to a router Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station 802.11ac If you have purchased a wireless router Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station and i want to connect a External Hard Drive to have access to it both from local network ( LAN ) And in Internet ( WAN ), You need to follow few simple steps. If you're looking for the best external hard drive that will save you a ton of cash, Buffalo's MiniStation Extreme NFC could be your match made in heaven.
- External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule
External drive connected to your Mac
Time Machine can back up to an external drive connected to a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire port on your Mac. If the disk isn't using the correct format, Time Machine will prompt you to erase it.
Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB
Many third-party NAS devices support Time Machine over SMB. For details, check the documentation for your NAS device.
Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination
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Reader Art Hall would like to take advantage of the USB port on his AirPort Extreme Base Station. He writes: I connected my external drive to the Airport Extreme Base Station with a USB cable. This is the one: SanDisk's Extreme Pro Portable SSD (1TB) is the fastest USB 3.1 Gen 2 external SSD we've seen to date. Burst performance is roughly on a par with the runner-up Samsung T7's, but it. As shown on the Apple website, the Airport Extreme has only one USB port. However, you can use a USB hub to connect multiple devices to it. (I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple eventually creates a Thunderbolt-compatible version of the Airport Extreme — and Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained, so you might be able to connect more than one hard drive at a time.).
To use another Mac on your network as a Time Machine backup destination, complete these steps on the other Mac:
- Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Sharing.
- From the list of services on the left, select File Sharing.
- From the Shared Folders list on the right, click the add button (+), then choose a folder to use for Time Machine backups.
- Control-click the folder that you added, then choose Advanced Options from the shortcuts menu that appears.
- From the Advanced Options dialog, select 'Share as a Time Machine backup destination.'
When setting up Time Machine on your other Mac computers, you should now be able to select the shared folder as a backup disk.
External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac) or AirPort Time Capsule
Time Machine can back up to an external USB drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort Time Capsule.
- Connect the drive directly to your Mac, then use Disk Utility to erase it.
- Connect the drive to a USB port on your AirPort base station, then turn it on.
- Open AirPort Utility, then select your base station and click Edit to view its settings.
- Click the Disks tab in the settings window.
- Select your backup disk from the list of partitions, then select 'Enable file sharing':
- If more than one user on your network will back up to this disk with Time Machine, you can use the Secure Shared Disks pop-up menu to make sure that they can view only their own backups, not yours. Choose 'With accounts' from the menu, then click the add button (+) to add users.
- Click Update to restart your base station and apply the settings.
AirPort Time Capsule
Time Machine can back up to the built-in hard disk of an AirPort Time Capsule on your network.
Learn more
- Time Machine can't back up to a disk formatted for Windows, or to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
I've used the AirPort Extreme as a WiFi hotspot for several years. Then I recently learned that USB devices can be connected to it and shared, like a USB printer and a USB hard drive!
Best External Hard Drive For Airport Extreme Trucks
I was very happy to see that when connected my legacy USB printer (Canon MX330), it just showed up on the WiFi network and my Wifi-connected laptops could now see the printer and print to it! Very nifty!
Hfs driver download. Then I learned that the Airport Extreme had only 1 USB port, but with a hub, multiple USB devices could be connected. So I bought an Anker 4-port ultra slim USB 3.0 data hub from Amazon. It arrived in a couple days, thanks to Amazon Prime.
Plugged it in and started connecting USB hard drives, but they didn't just work. By the way, the printer connected to the USB continued to work, so that's good news.
The first hard drive I tried was a Seagate GoFlex 200GB that I had formatted using NTFS. Come to find out that NTFS is a showstopper. Airport Extreme with Mac OS is only able to mount USB hard drives formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) or FAT16/FAT32 volumes.
Then I tried a hard drive that was formatted as a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) but that didn't work because it's very important to use a powered USB hub, not like the unpowered one I bought above. And my little USB hard drive was relying on the power from the USB hub, so it didn't get enough juice to run.
Then I tried a USB flash drive, and that worked. One thing to note on this: in AirPort Utility > Disks, I had to check the box for 'Enable file sharing' and while you can probably choose any of the 3 options, I chose 'With a disk password' for the most convenient security. Then I was able to see this USB flash drive as a connected server via Finder, as follows:
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- under Devices > Network > AIRXP > DRIVENAME
- under Shared > AIRXP > DRIVENAME
I figured if I'm having problems finding answers, maybe others would find this blog post helpful. When/if I have time, I might just update this blog post to be a simple and clear checklist of basic requirements for connecting USB hard drives to AirPort Extreme and save us all some hours of headache.
