Hi,

After recently losing all my data on my USB drive it got me thinking of ways to backup my data. I have looked at Apple's Time Capsule, I think it would be great as it will give be Gigabit Ethernet, wireless internet and backup facility. But I have a few questions about Time Capsule and Time Machine.

1 - Does Time Capsule and Time Machine back up external drives plugged into the computer? (e.g. USB Flash Drives and external hard drives.)

2 - If I lose my data say on one of my external drives can I recover it from Time Machine/Capsule?

Thanks a lot!

1 - You can back up external drives plugged into the computer. This can be done through the Time Machine preferences pane (under Options)

2 - Most likely, you will be able to recover it from the Capsule, just like a hard drive on a Mac.

Although the Time Capsule to speak of will work fine as a Network Drive elsewhere, Time Machine requires Leopard and it looks that you have a 800MHz G4 iMac which will not run it.

Yes, I know. I hopefully be upgrading to a new iMac at the end of this year as I am finding my iMac too slow.

Thanks for that.

I bought a 2.66 Ghz iMac and it is sweet!

Keep it simple -- use Apple's Disk Utility to erase and format the flash drive to Mac OS Extended format. It writes a hiddenfile on the stick, .com.apple.timemachine.supported, that allows Time Machine to back it up. It's not a conspiracy, it's just that flash memory is formatted for PC, not Mac.

If you did this could you read your USB stick on a PC, say at work?

No, because flash drives are usually in a FAT32 format which both Mac and PC can read and write from. If you change it to MacOSextended, you'll have issues on PCs.

i have a quick question.

I brought a external harddrive (wd something) thinking it would be able to use time machine when connected to my airport. turns out i was wrong.

if i use a time capsule, will i have the same problem?

Hey there abure,

What kind of airport do you have ? If you have an Airport Extreme base station, you can still connect your Western Digital hard drive to it via USB and you can use it as a Time Machine back-up

If you have an Airport Express, then unfortunately that will not work, so you can therefore purchase a Time Capsule which is basically an Airport Extreme with a 500GB/1TB hard drive built in

Good luck !

The support for Time Machine backup to USB drives attached to an airport extreme base station is not official. It was enabled in a firmware update not long ago, it's a bit unclear if it will be officially supported in the future - They should seeing as the time capsule/airport extreme base station are more or less the same.

last time i tried to backup via my airport extreme, it kept failing. it drove me nuts so i gave up. that was about 6 months ago.

To OP, as far as I can tell. Computers cannot backup to an external drive connected to the Time Capsule. You can only time machine backup from the computers to the internal drive in the Time Capsule.

The only benefit for having a USB drive connected to your Time Capsule is to have what's on the internal Time Capsule drive, copied onto the drive connected to it via USB.