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I just bought a 1TB external drive. I would like to set up time machine to backup wireless. Is there anyway I can do this with the components I have now. Which are 1 macbook osx 10.6, 1 desktop pc running win7, 1 1TB external, and multiple linksys wireless routers.

Obv I want the macbook to be wireless.

If there is no solution using these components what would I need?

Possible fixes: airport extreme? another mac?

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  • It's worth noting that, even with a Time Capsule, backing up over wireless commonly results in corruption due to the wireless cutting out in the middle of a backup. A discussion of this issue, as well as some solutions, are here: devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/04/… Commented Sep 1, 2009 at 21:31
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    I have been backing up several machines wirelessly, including multiple laptops that are close-and-go regularly, for over a year without a problem. While there were major issues in the initial release of Time Machine, software updates addressed many & Snow Leopard's TM has many significant additional fixes and performance improvements.
    – bbum
    Commented Sep 2, 2009 at 3:54
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    As a matter of fact, a comment on that very weblog from Dominic, one of the Filesystem engineers at Apple, indicates that with the latest versions of TM and TC, it has proven impossible to induce corruption through power outages, etc. Certainly, the windows box in the mix is a little different than a TC, but saying this is totally broken is misleading, at this time.
    – bbum
    Commented Sep 2, 2009 at 3:56

4 Answers 4

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Here's a great tutorial on how to do just that:

http://hupio.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/osx-timemachine-and-sambawindows-share/

Not entirely different from sharing out a folder on your Windows machine and connecting via SMB. :P

Sharing external storage between different operating systems?

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And while such solutions will probably use a sparse bundle, a detail to remember: if you ever make backups of really large files, then deleting those files from the backup (either manually, or when Time Machine removes expired daily and hourly backups) will not automatically reclaim the disk space -- until Time Machine really needs it. At that time, Time Machine might first remove a few more backups before realising what's going on.

See details at What is Time Machine doing? on Server Fault.

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iTimeMachine may do what you are looking for

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As a side note, you definitely should consider replacing your linksys with fonera and then you could use it as a cheap alternative Time Capsule.

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