Bob McCune

You may have heard Apple has released a firmware update for the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS). This is a major update if you own an AEBS as it finally delivers the ability to wirelessly backup your Mac systems via Time Machine. Although Apple hasn’t yet publicly made that pronouncement, I can confirm that is does, in fact, work.

One little glitch I initially ran into is it wouldn’t identify my wireless backup drive in the Time Machine interface even though I could connect to it through the Finder. The fix? I just plugged the drive straight into my MBP and started a Time Machine backup. I killed the job and plugged the drive back into my AEBS and now everything works just fine. It must have needed to write a signature of some kind identifying it as a valid back up device.

The initial backup, depending on the size of your drive, will likely take several hours to complete over WIFI, but the incremental backups only take a few seconds and are largely transparent to the user. Very cool!

-Bob