Hey Adam,

I’ve got a new Macbook Pro with OS X and Apps on a 128 Gb SSD in the SuperDrive bay. My data lives on a 1 TB HDD. Right now I have Time Machine backing up the 1TB drive (since OS and Apps are easily reinstalled and the SSD is more durable). The problem is that I need to put my MBP on my desk and plus in the Time Machine drive.

Is there a way to hook up the Time Machine to the USB port on my Airport Extreme and have the MBP connect to the shared drive automatically every time it connects to my WiFi and then have Time Machine back up? It would be sweet to just have the MBP backup automatically every time it’s in range of my WiFi.

 

 

Unfortunately that isn’t supported, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

“Time Machine can’t back up to an external disk connected to an AirPort Extreme”

Apple’s only supported solution in the “Airport” line  is the Time Capsule. I believe you may also connect a disk to another Mac and then use file sharing from System Preferences–>Sharing to make the disk available on the network. From there you would be able to mount the shared disk on your Macbook Pro and use Time Machine back up to it. As noted in the article liked to above, both machines need to be running 10.5.6 or later and must be using Apple File Protocol (AFP) file sharing.

There are ways to hack a solution together, but most report mixed results and it’s not supported by Apple. In my opinion you don’t want to have a backup system that could be less than reliable.