Comments on: AirPort Firmware 7.3.2 – Will it Float Time Machine?

By: David

David — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:40:45 +0000

I was happily running Time Machine backups wirelessly via Airport Extreme since May. So happy. Really happy. Loved. It.

I just ran the update last week and it ***cked everything up. My Macbook hangs, Time Machine doesn’t work, and it keeps screwing up permissions on every machine in the house (4 of them). I also had to repair the hard disk on my backup drive.

I’m rolling back to 7.3.1 and see if that makes everything run smoothly again.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:12:26 +0000

Am I the only one who could not make 7.3.2 work on the Time Capsule? Every time I’d start a backup on any of my systems, wired or wireless, and any other system would do anything on the network, the whole thing would hang, neither wired nor wireless systems could see the time capsule, and I’d have to hard reset the TC to get things working again. At that point, it got to where after getting networking going again, any backup attempt would give me an error that the computer could not connect to the backup device.

Finally I downgraded myself to 7.3.1 and have been rolling along happily ever since. I don’t know why, but 7.3.2 and my time capsule literally could not function with each other.

By: Christopher Price

Christopher Price — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:31:37 +0000

Sorry for the delay in following up. I’ll have a full update later. My PowerBook is in restore, via Wi-Fi, and it hasn’t failed! This is the farthest I’ve gotten with a TM restore over AirPort Disk, so hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be able to post back that everything works.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:56:30 +0000

I’m now able to use Wide channels when backing up 270 mb/s without interference, and dropping…of signal. I’m now very happy !

By: Christopher Price

Christopher Price — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:03:27 +0000

Hi Tom, the bugs users have experienced in the past with AirPort Disk and Time Machine are mostly related to restoring files. Namely… Time Machine refuses to do a full file restore. Also, I’ve confirmed HFS+ corruption when doing a Time Machine backup.

My system is still doing a full backup over Wi-Fi (I’m testing it on my PowerBook G4, so there’s 19 GB to back up). And, it’s going rather slow… about 12 mbps via 802.11g.

As soon as it finishes, I’ll be doing a full system restore (I have another Time Machine backup made over USB on a separate drive… so if/when the restore fails, I have a second backup).

Plus, I have an off-site Time Machine drive as well.

Just to be clear, even if Time Machine says it was successful with an AirPort Disk back up, do not trust it! Have at least another Time Machine drive with a full backup over USB/FireWire before testing.

P.S. You do have to open/mount the AirPort Disk for it to be listed as a Time Machine backup. But, only the first time. After doing that, Time Machine remembers the mount point, and will open/mount the drive’s network share when needed to do the backup.

By: Tom Wilberding

Tom Wilberding — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:26:37 +0000

I just applied the update myself. I was able to get time machine to (kind of) work previously with a USB drive hanging off of my Extereme. I’m not sure of the bugs you are referring to, but my problem was that I has to explicitly mount the AirPort Disk before it would function as a TimeCapsule volume, which is not the plug and play I had been hoping for.

I’m curious to hear the results of your test as I would like to buy a 1TB disk to dedicate to TimeCapsule backups for my whole household (5 macs total), but want to make sure everything works well before I do.

I will also do some testing today after work and comment back with anything relevant.