BT Homehub and Time Machine

Hello All

I am struggling with trying to set up a wireless back up option for time machine. I currently use my external drive via a direct USB connection to my iMac. This is fine but I would ideally like a wireless option to reduce clutter and move the backup drive away from the iMac.

I run a BT Home Hub 2.0 and have therefore connected my Toshiba Gigastore external hard drive via the hubs USB port. Unfortunately time machine does not appear to see the drive and being new to Macs I am at a loss where to go next?

Can anyone help?

LF

You need to nip into terminal and change a setting to show unsupported network drives:

Open Terminal (use Spotlight or find it in the Utilities folder in Applications)

Type/copy and paste this:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Press enter

You should now be able to see the drive in Time Machine setup

Thanks - will try that this evening. Is this deactivated by Apple for some specific reason as it seems a pretty useful option?

LF

Well they do sell time capsules to fulfill this function but I suspect it's disabled by default because of reliability.

Back up over wifi, via a router to a network attached or USB attached disk introduces several points of failure.

In your case I'd be very wary of the performance of the routers USB interface. Not one of the home hubs strengths. I'd be far more confident of an Ethernet connected disk.

That's a very good point - perhaps I should just shelve the wireless plan until I can afford a time capsule or similar ethernet connected external drive!

LF