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slugslugslug · Oct 8, 2007, 09:34 PM

Sometime after Leopard comes out, I'm probably going to have a 3- to 4-Mac household, so I'd like to have a centralized backup disk on the LAN. I'm wondering what the advantages/disadvantages are of a) getting a new Airport Extreme and attaching a fast USB HD to it or b) putting a dedicated NAS on my existing network.

My current Macs are a G5 iMac and a 1 GHz TiBook, and I'd be adding 1 or 2 MacBooks. Since my current Linksys router only has 802.11g wireless and 100BaseT ethernet, swapping it for the Airport's higher bandwidth sounds good, but I'm curious as to whether folks have other suggestions.

Thanks.
And, mods: if this fits better in Networking, I don't mind y'all moving it..

Mike.Bowden · Oct 8, 2007, 11:45 PM

I've got an AEBS and using the USB hub for a NAS isn't worth it at all. For some reason it runs much slower than normal USB 2. So I'd looking into other NAS options... You could always setup a drive on one of the other computers with a USB drive and just have all the other computers connect to it, that's how I did it for the longest time.

ginoledesma · Oct 9, 2007, 12:57 AM

I don't know the technical requirements of Time Machine, so this is all speculation.

I'm not sure what filesystem is required by Time Machine -- if that is relevant at all. If it requires HFS+, that cuts down the available NAS offerings to a handful. If it's filesystem-independent, then we should be good. Next is what file sharing protocol it works with -- whether it needs AFP or if it will work with SMB/CIFS as well. Most NAS products support the latter, as that's what Windows uses.

Unless you can get someone who has inside information about it, a more prudent recourse would be to wait.

adamcr · Mar 31, 2008, 04:07 PM

You can get Time Machine talking to a NAS -- and not just a Time Capsule or an Airport Express. It does require using an undocumented hack, so you may want to have another backup as a belt and braces approach (but then that's a good idea for backups anyway).

I've blogged my experiences of using Time Machine to backup to an SMB share with some reasonably detailed instructions, and also updated them for the changes in 10.5.2.