I just got a WD My Book and want to set it up as an external drive for back up using Time Machine. I have an Airport Extreme and using the USB port hooked it up to the Airport. With in the Airport Utilities I am able to see the WD My Book when I click on manual and then go over to disks. Im at a loss now at this point. How do I finish this off and get Time Machine working?! I opened up Time Machine and there are no disks that show up for me to select. I am hoping someone can help me out!!!
Hi there, first of all, what MyBook do you have? If it is an Essential or an Elite then you’ll need to format it on Disk Utility (Locally, connected directly to your Mac) before you can do anything else with the drive. Other than that, check as well if you can use the drive with Time Machine with the drive connected directly, if it works then move on to the Airport Extreme, if not then format the drive again as HFS+ with a GUID partition table (More info in how to do it in here).
On the Airport, the proper setup for TM would be as followed:
1- Connect the drive (Using the USB connection) to port on the back of the AE.
2- Open AirPort Utility, (Go> Utilities> AirPort Utility)
3- Select your AE, and then choose Manual Setup from the Base Station menu, or double-click the base. It can ask for a password.
4- Click “Disks” in the toolbar, and then click File Sharing.
5- Choose “With a disk password,” or “With base station password” if you want to secure the shared disk with a password, or choose “With accounts” if you want to secure the disk using accounts. If you choose to use accounts, click Configure Accounts, click the Add (+) button, and then enter a name and password for each user that will access the disk.
6- Choose “Read and write” for guest access .
8- Open Time Machine (Go> Applications> Time Machine)> Choose a Backup Disk> Connect as a Guest.
It can be a real pain in the rear to set the AE for external drives (Thanks Apple!) and is actually slower than using the drive locally for TM. Still, hope it helps.
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