Briefly: Apple still working on Time Machine's AirPort Disk support
All hope for wireless backup support under Apple's new operating system may not be lost, recent evidence suggests.
In the months leading up to last week's launch of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple had widely touted a feature of its new Time Machine backup solution that would allow users to back up their data not only to local disks but also AirPort Disks connected wirelessly via the company's new AirPort Extreme Base Station routers.
Apple, however, pulled the feature from Leopard and discarded all references to wireless backup from its Leopard-related web pages just days before the software hit retail shelves. No official explanation for the removal was ever provided, but informed speculation was that the feature wasn't quite ready for prime time.
According to a person familiar with Leopard's ongoing development, Apple is internally classifying the inability to select an AirPort Disk under Time Machine as a known issue. The matter is documented under a unique "Bug ID" number and titled: "Cannot set Time Machine Backup to AirPort Disk."
In the bug report, Apple notes that "Time Machine cannot find AirPort Disk as a Backup drive" even though the feature was "previously stated as available in online documentation." The issue is "currently being investigated by engineering."
The findings suggest that the AirPort Disk support under Time Machine could resurface in an upcoming maintenance update to Leopard, the first of which is well underway. However, it should also be noted that Apple has pulled features from its major operating system in the past and never looked back.
For instance, a feature dubbed "Home on iPod" was once destined for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and widely publicized on Apple's website before it was abruptly yanked from pre-release builds of Panther back in October of 2003.
Home on iPod would have allowed Mac OS X users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac after docking the iPod to that Mac.
The feature has yet to resurface.
In the months leading up to last week's launch of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple had widely touted a feature of its new Time Machine backup solution that would allow users to back up their data not only to local disks but also AirPort Disks connected wirelessly via the company's new AirPort Extreme Base Station routers.
Apple, however, pulled the feature from Leopard and discarded all references to wireless backup from its Leopard-related web pages just days before the software hit retail shelves. No official explanation for the removal was ever provided, but informed speculation was that the feature wasn't quite ready for prime time.
According to a person familiar with Leopard's ongoing development, Apple is internally classifying the inability to select an AirPort Disk under Time Machine as a known issue. The matter is documented under a unique "Bug ID" number and titled: "Cannot set Time Machine Backup to AirPort Disk."
In the bug report, Apple notes that "Time Machine cannot find AirPort Disk as a Backup drive" even though the feature was "previously stated as available in online documentation." The issue is "currently being investigated by engineering."
The findings suggest that the AirPort Disk support under Time Machine could resurface in an upcoming maintenance update to Leopard, the first of which is well underway. However, it should also be noted that Apple has pulled features from its major operating system in the past and never looked back.
For instance, a feature dubbed "Home on iPod" was once destined for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and widely publicized on Apple's website before it was abruptly yanked from pre-release builds of Panther back in October of 2003.
Home on iPod would have allowed Mac OS X users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac after docking the iPod to that Mac.
The feature has yet to resurface.
Comments
I read somewhere that your Airport Extreme drive will be recognized if you first connect it to your computer via USB directly and set it as a Time Machine volume, then remove it and plug it back into the Airport Extreme. Has anybody tried?
Yes, people have done it, you just have to use the terminal a bit.
Taken from Macrumors forums
Someone else please confirm I will post steps.
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.
Yes, people have done it, you just have to use the terminal a bit.
Taken from Macrumors forums
You can also pull it off without the Terminal. You just need to hook it up physically to the computer, set it as the Time Machine disk, and then shut off Time Machine and hook it back up to the Airport instead. Mount the airport disk, and Time Machine will see it.
I tried it briefly, and it was buggy as hell for me. I couldn't be certain that anything was getting backed up properly at all. I wouldn't recommend it.
However, I hooked up the same drive to the Firewire port on a Mac Mini on the same network, and it works fine for backing up my laptop wirelessly. So I don't think it's a matter of speed over the air. I think it's an issue with the Airport Disk implementation. Probably something that can be fixed with a firmware upgrade to the Airport, or 10.5.1. I have no doubt Apple is going to hammer this one out, rather than turning it into another Home on iPod.
I imagine god awful performance would be why it has been yanked. Of course even on Tiger the performance was pretty awful, try streaming an mpeg2 video over wireless G from it and it would skip and stutter all the time... over gigabit ethernet it was tolerable.
Home on iPod would have allowed Mac OS X users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac after docking the iPod to that Mac.
Home on iPod - or something like it - is now part of Leopard Server. It's called 'External Accounts' and there is a little box of information about it on the left of this page:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/client.html
I tried those steps earlier and can use my Airport Disk as my TM disk but every hour when it runs... it is awfully slow, takes 40-50 minutes for even minor updates of 50-100MB. I tried to run the initial backup over Airport Disk and it took some 30 hours to complete (LaCie 7200 RPM 250GB disk).
My initial backup was over a gigabit switch and it took less than 5.5 hours for 70GB. Not sure why yours took so long, unless you did it over wireless.
Home on iPod - or something like it - is now part of Leopard Server. It's called 'External Accounts' and there is a little box of information about it on the left of this page:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/client.html
Interesting but only on OS X server by the looks of it.
That's good, I'd like to see other networked drives supported too, ideally including SMB...
Won't happen.
You will be lucky to get AirPort backups, but Apple is not going to work on doing backups over SMB. Why? Well, give me a reason that they should... Keep in mind, Time Machine requires a drive to be partitioned in GPT.
Unrelated to this article, but any idea why its taking Apple so long to update the OS included on all their machines at the Apple Online Store? it still shows 10.4 Tiger for all laptops and desktops! (whereas the iLife 08' update was done instantly.)
Not sure but are they still shipping Tiger installed? If so, maybe it is cheaper to stick a Leopard DVD in the box and say, welcome to Apple, now update your OS. At least until they get the systems they have loaded with Tiger out the door.
Time Machine backing up to an Apple-branded NAS drive, however, seems like a natural extension to the continued trend toward laptops over desktops.
Well, Home on iPod sounds like it was a bit beyond the pale for Joe iPod User who stores his digital media on an iPod. Beside, I think it's clear Apple went for the cloud-computing model and wanted to force people to pay $100/year for a .Mac account.
Time Machine backing up to an Apple-branded NAS drive, however, seems like a natural extension to the continued trend toward laptops over desktops.
It also seems to me to be a security issue. Servers usually are more physically protected. But, a computer on a desk is very vulnerable.
The issue is the Airport Extreme Router. AirDisk is a very buggy feature, do a quick search of the support forms.This applies to both the 100mbps and the Gigabit N Routers.
The issue is with the AirPort Extreme Base Stations, but not exactly for the reason you've mentioned.
Time Machine would send gigabits of data over the network, so in order to ensure data integrity, Apple implemented new features in the AFP protocol (used to do File Sharing in Mac OS X) to basically verify everything it receives. After all, you don't want your backups to be corrupt. (Previous versions of AFP had basic parity checking but nothing as extensive).
Before allowing a remote volume to be used with Time Machine, Time Machine makes sure that the remote volume supports these extra sanity checks. Apple implemented this feature as part of the Apple File Sharing implementation that ships with Leopard, so using File Sharing as Time Machine backup disks still works. However Apple will need to issue a firmware update for the AirPort Extreme base stations for Time Machine to work with the AirDisk feature.
However it's not as simple as sending out a firmware update with the new AFP protocol; as others have noted, the AirDisk feature is pretty buggy. The sanity checks consistently fail when used on AirDisk drives because of a variety of issues, the least of which is that wireless networking is notoriously more prone to failure.
BTW, Time Machine prohibits all disks not using HFS+ because it uses filesystem features unique to HFS. Specifically it uses directory hard links. Even if AirDisk is supported in the future, only NAS devices that support the latest AFP protocol and HFS+ drives would be supported. I don't know of any NAS devices that meet such requirements except Apple's own routers. So no UFS devices on SMB connections, even from Apple's own AirPorts.
Before allowing a remote volume to be used with Time Machine, Time Machine makes sure that the remote volume supports these extra sanity checks. Apple implemented this feature as part of the Apple File Sharing implementation that ships with Leopard, so using File Sharing as Time Machine backup disks still works. However Apple will need to issue a firmware update for the AirPort Extreme base stations for Time Machine to work with the AirDisk feature.
However it's not as simple as sending out a firmware update with the new AFP protocol; as others have noted, the AirDisk feature is pretty buggy. The sanity checks consistently fail when used on AirDisk drives because of a variety of issues, the least of which is that wireless networking is notoriously more prone to failure.
Suggesting that failure rate of wireless networking is the cause for this slowdown has no factual basis. As I have understood backups appear to run slower to the AirDisk than the normal wireless performance would suggest.
It would be a very peculiar claim to say that Time Machine backups were more prone to errors and hence result more resending over the wireless. Error checking and resends are already handled at wireless and TCP/IP layers so the resulting effect is the same for HTTP, FTP and AFP as well as all the other protocols running over IP. Or do you witness a lot of corrupted web pages and images when surfing over wireless?