[dfs]

To do backups via Airport Extreme or in certain other conditions (e. g. a shared ethernet disk) you first need to create a container to hold your backup, a so-called sparsebundle disk image, and under some conditions Time Machine will refuse to create one properly (probably because Apple has blocked this ability for these conditions, and what you're seeing is the blocking mechanism doing its thing). But there is a workaround. Initiate another initial backup with Time Machine. it will indeed create a sparsebundle and keep it on your external disk for a minute or two before taking it down and telling you it's impossible. Now this is very important: while the sparsebundle is temporarily visible in your Finder, make a record of the name it is assigned. by Time Machine Then let it disappear. Then open Disk Utiity and use it to manually create a sparsebundle on your external disk (the Disk Utility help files tell you how to do this) and assign it exactly the same name as the one momentarily created by Time Machine. As part of the creation process, you will be asked how large you want to make the sparsebundle and you must be very careful to assign it a size less than the capacity of your external hard disk (if you get the bright idea of assigning it a larger size, sooner or later some extremely bad things will happen to you). And, if you are going to have two or Macs backing up to the same external, make sure that the sum of the sizes you assign to your individual sparsebundles does not exceed the capacity of your external). Okay, when you have manually created a properly named sparsebundle, Time Machine ought to see it and will start backing up to it with no further trouble. IMPORTANT NOTE: DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Although using this method I had have two Macs backing up to a shared ethernet disk via Airport Extreme using Time Machine for the past month and have experienced no difficulties worth talking about, I can't guarantee that sooner or later something won't go hideously wrong and all my data won't be corrupted or lost . One thing you can do to protect yourself is to make periodic backups of the sparsebundles themselves onto some other volume than your backup disk, so if one gets corrupted you can easily bring up a relatively recent backup copy. Get back to me on this forum if you have further questions or problems, and lotsa luck (let's hope that sooner or later Apple unblocks these possible backup solutions so we don't have to rely on these maybe questionable workarounds!) For further information read this article by an extremely bright German guy: http://www.flokru.or...res-in-leopard/

[maevans3]

Hi everyone
I have recently purchased an Airport Extreme (less than a week ago) and wanted to enable central backup under Time Machine from my iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro.

I have a Maxtor Essentials 500GB drive that I have attached to the Airport and it is recognised; however when I try to set up Time Machine to use the drive it appears to recognise it and starts the backup but then fails a short while afterwards with the message "Time Machine Error: The backup volume could not be mounted".

I have attached the USB drive to my iMac and repaired the volume which did appear to spot and fix some errors but I still can not get Time Machine to use it.

I am relatively new to the Mac OS X arena so could well be missing out on the obvious!

Hope someone can help me shed some light on this and get it working?

Regards


Mark