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    What was Apple thinking? (Airport Extreme)

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by SP Forsythe, Feb 11, 2011.

  1. SP Forsythe

    SP Forsythe Notebook Evangelist

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    If one uses an Airport Extreme along with a NAS drive to perform wireless Time-Machine backups, then restores can only be done in the same manner.

    In other words, Time Machine can't access the drive's backups directly via Firewire or USB.

    Now, I understand that when Time Machine backs up wirelessly, it uses a different methodology of storing the backup file (e.g. sparsefile).

    My question is... Why is there no functionality within time machine to deal with the sparsefile on a direct connection? I figure there must be some technical reason why Apple couldn't make it possible.

    What it means is that in order to perform a restoration after a OS reinstall, one also has to also restore the secured router connection AND perform a restoration that can easily take 10 hours, instead of minutes using Firewire.
     
    SP Forsythe, Feb 11, 2011
    #1
  2. crazycanuk

    crazycanuk Notebook Virtuoso

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    there is no technical reason AFIK. most Linux and UNIX distros support this as well as other OS's. I access network sparsefile backups directly quite regularly with Solaris, BSD, DebIan and Ubuntu.

    a hardcable from the Airport to your laptop will be faster than wireless but agreed it seems to be a very silly restriction.
     
    crazycanuk, Feb 11, 2011
    #2
  3. aznguyen316

    aznguyen316 Rock Chalk Jayhawk

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    oh dang I didn't know that. Luckily I made an OS backup via USB and also did full system SSD+HDD via Time Machine usb external hdd... that's gonna be SLOWWW
     
    aznguyen316, Feb 11, 2011
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  4. Bog

    Bog Losing it...

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    Maybe it is because direct connections don't use sparsefile as a way of transferring data... maybe?
     
    Bog, Feb 12, 2011
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  5. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    conceptually, it doesn't seem to matter. it should be able to be made to work.
     
    masterchef341, Feb 12, 2011
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  6. aznguyen316

    aznguyen316 Rock Chalk Jayhawk

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    true.. I haven't tried but my ext HDD has two partitons a time machine one and a data file one. Can OSX read the data file partition (HFS) as a normal partition when plugged in? If so then yeah time machine backups should be able to be read both ways. That's really fail.
     
    aznguyen316, Feb 12, 2011
    #6