[markw10]

I am disappointed about not being able to use Time Machine with a Airport Base Station Hard Drive and with using laptops I don't really want to have to tote a hard drive around with my laptop when I use it around the house.

1. I've read that you can use it with networked hard drives that are attached via Ethernet cable to the home network. Is that true? I'm not too familiar with AFP drives but I've read that the Lacie Ethernet Big Disk has this feature but are there any others?

2. If this is true about AFP drives I have another question. If I'm going out of town for a week for example if I buy a network AFP drive which also has USB and/or Firewire can I simply unplug it, take the drive with me to use for backups while on vacation (through USB or Firewire) and then when home connect it back to the network? Will it continue to backup this way? I know I could simply not back up for that week and come home and it would immediately update backups but some of my trips are very critical and I would like to have backups during them.

3. Also, any suggestions of a good backup AFP drive? I was going to look at Lacie Rugged Drives as a backup solution. They are very compact and light but since they are laptop 2.5" drives they only go up to 250GB. Since each other my MBP's has around 120GB of Data I'd prefer to go with 500GB Backup Drives

4. Okay, one other question. I also am getting an iMac so there's a chance if the AFP doesn't work out I'll get a standard USB/Firewire drive. I know I can attach it to the iMac and then use it to back up to from my MBP over the network. If I do this just like in question 2, could I disconnect it while on a trip to use it on the go and then when home connect it again to my iMac and continue backing up?

Sorry for all the questions. Time Machine seems great but confusing to the newbie. I have Leopard now on the way and should receive it early next week so I want to see what type of hard drive solution to get.

[nerd]

From what I understand you can only back up to to AFP share if the host computer is a Mac. My Ubuntu/Netatalk AFP share doesn't show up in TimeMachine. I don't think any of your NAS solutions out there will work either even if they have native AFP support.

I believe your answer to question 4 is yes. My understanding is TimeMachine will simply wait for your backup drive to be plugged back in and once it is it'll back up what it needs.

[mduell]

Someone in another thread reported success by initializing Time Machine with the drive connected locally (via USB), then plugging it in to their AEBS. Seems it just needed to write some files to make Time Machine recognize it.

[Drakino]

If someone here has 2 Macs, and an AFP NAS or server that isn't running Leopard, feel free to try this out:
ReadyNAS :: View topic - Time Machine and ReadyNAS solution (Two Mac method)

I got it working for my two Macs on my home network, with an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ as the location of the backups. They key things I found are:

1. Initially creating the Time Machine backup over the network causes a sparsebundle disk image to be created and not a loose folder.
2. The sparseimage gets named after your computer name, then the MAC address of the ethernet port.
3. Two hidden files are also made, a 0 byte .com.apple.timemachine.supported and a 16 byte file .MACaddress, with unknown binary data in it.
4. The AFP Share needs to be named exactly the same as the disk name used to create the initial backup

So far, this has worked all day for me, across reboots. I can create and delete files and then use Time Machine to get them back, the same as if the disk was local. Both over wireless and wired networking.

[besson3c]

Sorry for creating another thread for this, I didn't notice this topic...

Here is the other thread, FWIW:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...x/#post3524480

[Liquidity X]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Someone in another thread reported success by initializing Time Machine with the drive connected locally (via USB), then plugging it in to their AEBS. Seems it just needed to write some files to make Time Machine recognize it.

Have a link to that thread?