by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

Woo Woo! Apple came through. Today they released an OSX update for Time Machine and an Airport Extreme firmware update. You have to do BOTH of them to see a shared USB drive on your Extreme as a drive option in Time Machine.

You also have to access the drive, thus mounting it once before Time Machine can see it. Now here is where I had fun tonight.

My 24″ Intel iMac could see the shared USB drive as a valid TM target drive. BUT no other mac in my house could. Even though they were all updated and could mount and browse the shared drive as a NAS drive. Wireless vs wired didn’t matter. Intel vs PPC didn’t matter. I even tried manually reapplying the OSX Time Machine patch. No luck.

Finally here is what did work. In the airport utility I did a “Disconnect all users”. I then removed the drive from the Extreme N Router. I directly attached it to one of my macs, ran a repair permissions. It found and fixed a few things. I then re-attached it back to the Extreme. Now once I mounted the drive on each mac, the drive showed up fine in TM as a valid target. It did not overwrite existing files but made a new sparse image file for each mac I sent the TM backup for.

So if you have done all the updates, can browse it through the shared NAS option but never see it as a Time Machine target when you go to change drive, do the repair permissions while USB wired directly to a mac. That should fix you up.

Good luck and happy backups!