One of my listeners Reinaldo, also know as EagerDragon over at the AppleInsider Forums, wrote to me and posted a comment on this web-site stating that nowhere on Apples web-site do they proclaim to provide official support for using an AirPort Extreme with an external drive as a way to do backups with TimeMachine. I tended to disagree with Reinaldo, and asked him to post his comments, as differing opinions are always encouraged here.

Today he updated me with a link to a post over at AppleInsider Forums where he makes the same statements, shortly followed by another post by “Taylorman” who claims that he spent three hours talking to Apple Support about this issue and was told over and over that. . .

“while some rumor sites claim that Apple supports this functionality, and that some people seem to be able to accomplish it- Apple in no way supports or claims to provide wireless backup functionality through Time Machine through anything other than TimeCapsule.”

Again, to see the full comments go here (their comments are comments 16 and 18).

What is Apples position on this. Well, Apple hasn’t called and I can’t find any reference to it on the net, however over at the AirPort Extreme Apple web-site they say the following . . .

” The AirPort Extreme lets you turn your external USB hard drive into a drive you can share with all the users on your network. It’s called AirPort Disk, and it’s a simple and convenient way to share files among everyone in your family, office, or class.”

I have searched the Apple web-site to see if there is any evidence of Apple supporting the use of the AirPort Extreme along with an attached drive as a TimeMachine (like the TimeCapsule does). I have found no such evidence.

The question then becomes does Apple support TM writing to sparse bundles on a NAS? We know that you can indeed use the AirPort Extreme for this purpose. Associate Editor George Starcher from this blog has done it successfully (both on a wired and wireless network).

The fact that Apple does not want to spend time, support hours, money, and effort to “officially” provide phone or other support for the AirPort Extreme does not surprise however. With so many different brands of hard-drives, routers etc; why would they want to provide this support?

To me that does not mean the AirPort Extreme can’t do it, or that people should not do it (at their own risk).

I think that it is our responsibility to report what functionality we find in devices like this that does work.

I want to thank Reinaldo for his interest in the subject and for providing a differing opinion on this subject. The fact remains that there is no official documentation that I have seen that supports that Apple does or does not provide support for this function.