GL-AR300M connect external hard disk for time machine backup

Hello there, I have ordered a WD 4TB My Book external hard disk with external power supply. I use Macbook. I will format the hard disk to be apple file system compatible so that time machine backups can be taken. Can I connect the hard disk to my AR300M and access as a local drive? What steps do I need to take?

This is my firmware version:

I cannot remember when there is a firmware v3.04. This is a AR300MD, dual band version?

I also don’t know how time machine works. Sorry about this.

Direct attach your USB MyBook drive directly to your MacBook - it’ll work much better there than trying to do things over the network…

@alzhao - TimeMachine over the network uses an Apple sparebundle inside a DiskImage (DMG) that is mounted via either Samba or netatalk - Apple doesn’t document it very well, and they make changes to their internal spec over time that breaks reverse engineered support for the TimeMachine backup.

It’ll work for a while, as it’s basically building a chain of hard links, but when the TimeMachine client starts to thin the image (imagine 100,000’s of hardlinks that are cleaned up), it can blow up and kill the sparsebundle as the server gets overwhelmed with IO requests…

Apple’s Airport/TimeCapsules are NetBSD based, and their tuned specifically for this kind of work.

My recommendation is that TimeMachine support is not officially supported…

Some insight into TimeMachine and how it works – http://www.baligu.com/pondini/TM/Works.html

Thanks very much for the explanation.