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Nigel Jones

Regular Contributor
I'm using the latest merlin 380 on a rt-ac3200. Thinking of picking up a 4 or 8Gb external had for use for time machine etc.


I don't expect the router to be fast but does it generally work ok?


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I'm using the latest merlin 380 on a rt-ac3200. Thinking of picking up a 4 or 8Gb external had for use for time machine etc.


I don't expect the router to be fast but does it generally work ok?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

couple of questions...

1. Does your mac have usb ports?
2. Time machine does an initial backup. considerably more than 8gb, then performs incremental backups hourly

Timemachine can be a bit pertinacity with some devices.

Typically setup in my office is for the laptops, a nas access via the router., with 3Tb disks, and for the server a 3Tb attached via usb3. I note that the ac3200 has TM support, but at the end of the day it is a router, not a nas or an attached disk drive.
 
Last edited:
I’ve tried it and it’s no different to my Apple Time-capsule. So long as you have a USB3 drive you’ll be Ok.

And I assume you mean 4 or 8 Tb not Gb!

As suggested the initial backup will take some time - recommend having the Mac plugged in via Ethernet and letting it go over night, maybe even a weekend. But after that the incremental backups take just a few minutes and you don’t even notice it happening aside from the icon on the menu bar.


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Oops. Yes TB!

My mac is a 2016 15" touchbar so no native USB or Ethernet. I just use wireless though get decent speeds. Not a big deal for initial backup.

Sounds like it's worth a shot. A TB or so should be enough for the mac, another TB mac for windows machines, and another for more photod backed up (already on mirrored disks and cloud backup - paranoid!), so a 4 most likely, though 6 or 8 if amazon prime deals pop up!
 
Large External Drives can be problematic as the filesystem table can run out of memory...

TimeMachine - I wouldn't recommend it outside of OSX server or an Apple TimeCapsule - things will work for a while, but when TimeMachine client starts thinning the weekly backups, it can go very badly..
 
I don't expect the router to be fast but does it generally work ok?
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Im using it w a 4TB drive and seems to work ok. Took 20hrs to backup my Mac Pro 750gb but seems ok. Nice that it’s away from my pc and hidden in a closet.
 
Large External Drives can be problematic as the filesystem table can run out of memory...

TimeMachine - I wouldn't recommend it outside of OSX server or an Apple TimeCapsule - things will work for a while, but when TimeMachine client starts thinning the weekly backups, it can go very badly..
I echo this thought with this addendum - when your main machine craps out, that’s not an ideal time to discover that your backup is no good.
 

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