Apple's Airport Disk Finally Supports Time Machine

I wrote in late January about the general user furor over the announcement of Time Capsule. To be exact, it wasn't all users - only those who had purchased the Airport Extreme because of Airport Disk, a way to add an external USB hard drive to the router for sharing on the network.

Why? Because Leopard (MacOS 10.5) had been advertised as being able to use the Airport Disk with Time Machine. In fact, pre-release versions had that functionality. Then, when Leopard was released, a tech note was posted (on the launch day) that said the Airport Disk was not supported. You can imagine how well that went over.

Wednesday Apple released a firmware upgrade, 7.3.1, for the Airport Extreme that fixes the issue, as long as you install a few prerequisites as well.

You have to apply AirPort Update 2008-001 and install Time Machine and AirPort Updates 1.0 first. Then you launch the AirPort Utility (in /Applications/Utilities). You should be prompted to update to firmware 7.3.1; if not, choose "Manual Setup" and then "Upload Firmware" from the Base Station menu.

This should resolve the outrage felt by many who felt betrayed by the introduction of the Time Capsule. One example of angry posts on Apple's discussion forums is this post, which said:

I was one of the suckers to buy an AE and 500GB hard drive when Apple posted that Leopard would be the answer to the back-up problem. All you needed was a AE and USB drive and Time Machine would do the rest. I believed them and look where that got me.

Glad to see Apple finally fix this problem. Why this feature was in pre-release versions of Leopard and was dropped in the final release is unclear. But if anyone remembers how programmers were pulled off Leopard and other projects to work on the iPhone - well, that could be a possible explanation.