AEBS - Where is the Airport Disk Utility?

AlanD

I've just installed my new Airport Extreme Base Station and am having some good results with it. It's just sorting out my time machine backup now.

In many articles, including apple articles, there is mention of the Airport Disk Utility, but I cannot find it.

Is it part of the current Airport Utility app, when you click on Disks? It's just that online articles reference options on the Airport Disk Utility that are not in the Airport Utility under Disks.

What's the deal?

Thanks

Alan.

J-blk

I'm not sure there is one either - I manage my AirPort Disk through the Airport Utility just fine, all setup was done there, Time Machine is set up for it, both my Macs can access it on the network, access restrictions can be set, etc. What options do you seem to be missing?

AlanD

The articles I read could have been referring to the previous version of the airport utility. It looks like I can do anything I need with this version.

However, I am having issues. I am having great difficulty getting Time Machine to get up and running. I've read that you can't have the remote disk mounted, so what I've done is mounted it, selected it in Time Machine as the destination and ejected it. Then Time Machine works away. But the first time I did this it didn't recognise the drive a previous Time Machine and do wanted to fit 56gigs of data on to what space was left on the Time Machine drive. So I bit the bullet and erased my backups. Now the pressure is on to get my backups complete again. But, when doing this, it stalls after 2/3 gigs and just stops. Any ideas?

Another issue I am having is access to another shared external drive connected to the AEBS seems to cause the unit to crash and so I can't connect to anything and have to reboot it.

Plus this morning, my disks are not being recognised and my MacBook couldn't find the AEBS even though it was working fine when I shut down the MacBook last night.

I know they are all probably small fixes, but your help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Sad Professor

If you have Leopard you don't need Airport Disk Utility. The relevant settings are within the Disks tab in the Airport Utility.

Is the AEBS firmware up-to-date? 7.3.1 or 7.3.2 is the latest I think.

Apple don't officially support using Time Machine with Airport Disk (they did initially but then changed their mind) but it was supposed to be working anyway with the last update.

AlanD

The base station arrived just yesterday so I'm assuming it's the latest firmware, but how do I check it?

Edit: Just checked, it's 7.3.2

So why does it struggle to send 56gigs over the air?

J-blk

Oddly enough, I had this problem with my first backup too - which was around 45GB or so - it failed and I had issues getting Time Machine to work with it. I re-did it the next day, wiping the HDD and starting from scratch, though the first backup took forever... Since then, it has worked fine, with the exception of a couple of corrupted backups (that I am having issues getting rid of now, but that's another story ).

Does your AirPort signal drop completely during the backups? Do you have to reconnect manually? I've noticed that if the signal drops during a backup, Time Machine will wait for awhile until a reconnection is established, but if it takes too long (not sure how long at this point) to get back on the network, it'll time out and fail. I've had a signal drop a couple of times during a backup, but it manages to reconnect just fine.

AlanD

I'm not sure why it failed the first couple of times. I didn't notice a dropped signal and when I came back to see it failing, my internet worked.

What I'm doing now is backing up anyway directly just in case. Then I'll work on the issue.

I should have bought a time capsule!!

J-blk

AlanD wrote: »

I should have bought a time capsule!!

TBH, I don't think the Time Capsule would be any better - and I like having control over what hard drive I connect up, etc. And if one part of the equation dies (hard drive or Airport), you're not left without both while getting it replaced, like you would with the TC.

I'm guessing the first (large) backup can be very finicky - I remember reading about MacBook Air users having problems and Apple essentially recommending they do the first backup while wired up, but of course since the Air does not have an ethernet jack, they were SOL... Once you get through that backup, I'd imagine it'll sort itself out.

When you have it set up, remember to exclude anything you do not want backed up all the time, otherwise it will be copying GBs over every hour. I noticed this with my VM Fusion backups - every time I used the VM, the file changes and Time Machine tries to backup 4GB+ (or whatever the VM size is at that point). I simply excluded this from the backup.

AlanD

good point actually about the flexibility with AEBS and separate external.

First back up is still running, so fingers crossed it'll be ok when I put the external behind the AEBS.

Thing is Time Machine didn't recgonise my previous backups, which had been running directly for the past 10 months.

So I started from scratch again.

J-blk

AlanD wrote: »

Thing is Time Machine didn't recgonise my previous backups, which had been running directly for the past 10 months.

So I started from scratch again.

TBH though Time Machine is a pretty neat feature and can save your bacon in a pinch, it just feels more like a Windows feature than something that belongs in Mac OS X . Like I mentioned above, I've had it screw up a backup when something happens in the middle of it, like putting the MBP to sleep, etc. I also hate that the only option you can really configure is what to exclude, no option to change the one hour backup intervals, etc. Overall, I'd class it as a pretty average feature.

On the other hand, the AEBS is a great piece of kit and I do love it - though I've only had it about 3 months now so time will tell. It's replacing two different Linksys routers I've had were the WiFi has just died on them after only a year or less in each case... Hopefully the AEBS will last longer.

AlanD

Managed to get Time Machine up and running through the AEBS. Works great!

J-blk

Great stuff! I hope you have no further problems with it - it works well enough for me, except for the odd glitchy image as mentioned above. Did you end up having to do the first large backup while wired? If that's the case, I'm definitely seen a pattern with the larger backups failing over WiFi - shame on you, Apple .

AlanD

Yes I had to do the first backup wired alright. But what was more disappointing is that time machine didn't recognise the volume that had been used as a backup for the past 10 months or so. So when I moved my original volume to behind the AEBS and made it remote, time machine shrugged it's shoulders and didn't bother with it. So I had to start from scratch again. I haven't tested it yet to see can it successfully bring back a file for me yet, but I will.

Next up? Airport express. I've just built a new extension and thought that the 5Ghz range on the AEBS would bring a signal out there.....we're talking 20 extra yards. No joy. Zero signal.