With the updates to its AirPort Extreme wireless base stations, Apple restores the ability of users to connect a USB disk and use it as a Time Machine backup.
Apple has brought back a very handy feature for Leopard users that own an AirPort Extreme.
With the updates to its AirPort Extreme wireless base stations on Wednesday, Apple restored the ability of users to connect a USB disk and use it as a Time Machine backup.
If you have a USB drive, you must connect it to your Mac and format the disk as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) using Apple's Disk Utility. Once that is done, plug the disk into your base station's USB port.
Open a Finder Window and in the left hand sidebar you should see a new disk in the "Shared" section. Click on the drive that has the same name as your base station and then double-click the enclosed folder -- this will mount your USB drive on your desktop and allow Time Machine to find it.
Open the Time Machine preferences and click "Choose Disk." Your newly formatted USB drive will now be available as a Time Machine backup disk.
It's curious that Apple reactivated this feature now. When they first introduced Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, the ability to backup to a USB disk connected to an AirPort Extreme was a selling point. However, by the time operating system shipped, that feature had been removed.
When the company introduced Time Capsule -- a hard drive and 802.11n wireless base station built specifically for Time Machine -- in January, the speculation around Macworld Expo was that Apple disabled the feature so they could sell these devices.
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