Time Machine Update: Back Up on AirPort Extreme Added

Wednesday has been an update-full day as Apple has released one uber update for all Mac users addressing around 80 vulnerabilities just yesterday, with the Cupertino based company rolling out yet another one towards the end of the day, including compatibility improvements for using Time Machine with Time Capsule, and some AirPort driver fixes. Most importantly, you can now use a disk attached to the AirPort Extreme base station as a backup drive with the Time Machine.

Some of you may remember that Apple initially said it would be possible to perform backup to a USB disk connected to the AirPort Extreme, when the company first talked about it. But as it turned out, 802.11n base station launched without this particular feature. Later on, Apple launched Time Capsule, an 802.11n wireless base station sporting either 500GB or 1TB of hard drive space, incurring the wrath of AirPort Extreme users even more, since they still couldn't back up directly from the base station.

Surprisingly, in rolling the update to Time Machine, Apple didn't mention the added ability to back up to a disk attached to the AirPort Extreme base station: "This update is recommended for all users and includes compatibility improvements for using Time Machine with Time Capsule, as well as AirPort driver fixes," says Apple.

But according to user reports, the feature is indeed available with the update.

Using an AirPort Extreme Base Station Mac owners can print and share an external hard drive, create large, high-speed network, but also use it as a router with four Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Time Machine is a backup utility developed by Apple which is included with Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard). It creates incremental backups of files which can be restored whenever a user wishes to, allows for a full system, restore for multiple files, or even a single file.