Apple confirmed for me last week that a feature for using hard drives attached via USB to an AirPort Extreme Base Station is an unsupported feature. The company declined to provide further information. This feature was available in the betas of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, as has been widely reported, but was removed from the public Leopard feature list and from the shipping version of the operating system. Apple had been working on providing me a definitive statement since my review of Time Capsule for Macworld was published on 21-Mar-08.
What a “lack of support” means is that if you attempt to use an 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station for Time Machine backup, you won’t get any help from Apple’s technical support, something that readers have already told me. I’ve been receiving reports that USB-attached drives work erratically with an AirPort Extreme. TidBITS editor Joe Kissell and I have been discussing the strange array of scenarios in which you find an Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) volume that’s shared by the AirPort Extreme server not appearing automatically for Time Machine. (See “MacVoices Podcast Covers Time Capsule Ins and Outs,” 2008-04-03, for links to the podcasts. I also talked about Time Capsule and this problem in a podcast on 26-Mar-08 with Jason Snell, editorial director for Macworld.) (link)
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