Not sure if this should be in the Networking forum, sorry.
I had been using Time Machine with no issues for a couple of months. Got an Airport Extreme (Gigabit version) recently that I hooked up to my external storage via USB 2.0. Very cool being able to browse it wirelessly.
Even though I knew that Apple had yanked Air Disk functionality from Time Machine, I decided to try and do a Time Machine backup wirelessly anyway.
The little Time Machine window came up, the one with the progress bar, and it said "Preparing". But a dialog box popped up and said there wasn't enough room on the drive. Basically, Time Machine was acting as if I was backing up for the first time.
No problem, I thought. I'll just do Time Machine backups when I'm wired into the external storage directly. But I get the same behavior when I connect directly to the drive. Oh noes! I haven't been able to do a backup in almost a month now.
There's a sparse bundle folder on my external storage that I don't recall seeing before. If I delete this, will it help Time Machine remember that it's already backed up my entire computer and it doesn't need all that space anymore?
The only other thing I can think of is to delete all of the Time Machine backup files on the external drive.
I suppose I brought it on myself, but I figured it just wouldn't work rather than breaking itself in this fashion. I wonder about 2 things though:
1) If I clear off space on the external drive, will Time Machine work wirelessly with the Airport Extreme? You'd think a very specific error message would come up like, "You cannot make wireless backups with Time Machine. Please connect directly to your external storage device."
2) I've specified this drive as my Time Machine backup. Every time I connect to it wirelessly to browse and move around files, will Time Machine try to backup and screw me all over again?
I'm more concerned about the second option. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions for how I can fix everything, that would be great. Thanks!
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