Quick question about USB drive attached to Airport Extreme

My husband wants to attach his backup drive to the USB port on the Airport Extreme, so that he can run Time Machine for his backup wirelessly. I've never done it this way and I wonder about the safety of the information that he's backing up.

I know that the drive will show up as a shared drive and I can withhold guests from accessing it. Is there any way to password the drive or otherwise insure the info? Not talking CIA level encryption, just trying to keep the information as safe as possible. Am I understanding correctly that even to access the drive, you would have to know both the modem and the network password? Am I worrying needlessly about the level of security?

TIA

Why not just encrypt the backup (thus encrypting the sparsebundle)? I believe it's an option when you create it.

Wondering if you got this to work. I just bought an Airport Extreme to do the same thing, using the LaCie HD that I had previously been using for time machine backups connected by USB cable.

Could not get it to work, and some research yielded a post by Apple on their support pages that this was NOT possible - Time Machine would not back up to an external drive wirelessly. Have seen other posts here that suggest otherwise.

Any comments? Thank you.

pj-48N said:

Wondering if you got this to work. I just bought an Airport Extreme to do the same thing, using the LaCie HD that I had previously been using for time machine backups connected by USB cable.

Could not get it to work, and some research yielded a post by Apple on their support pages that this was NOT possible - Time Machine would not back up to an external drive wirelessly. Have seen other posts here that suggest otherwise.

Any comments? Thank you.

Click to expand...

Yes it is I have been doing this for years on two different AEBS just make sure it shows up in sharing in Finder and select the drive under option in TM.