Use Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS network drive as backup destination for time machine on Mac OS X 10.5

As my 500GB Time Capsule has reached the limits (my Macbook and the iMac of my wife used it as backup destination for Time Machine), I decided to buy another backup drive and settled with the Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS external drive. The main advantage (besides the price: I bought it for EUR 146,95 (incl. VAT and free transportation) for me was that I could easily connect it to a free Ethernet port of my Time Capsule - at least that was what I did expected. But after I connected the My Book to my network as discribed in the My Book manual, I had to discover that although it was available in the finder and I could manually copy files to it, it wasn't available in Time Machine as a back up destination.

Furtunately obvioulsly others experienced this problem before and after some googling I came to the solution described in the post "Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard" from Florian Kruse. Following the steps described there I was finally able to use the
Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS connected to my Time Capsule as back up destination for Time Machine on my wife's iMac.

I wounder, why Apple don't enable the usage of network shares in Time Machine by default.

2011-07-23 Update: The upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) broke that solution. I am currently waiting for an update by Western Digital. For more information go to their webpage.


2012-05-28 Update: In the meantime, an update is available from Western Digital. This could be easily installed via the automatic update function of the Western Digital Configuration Tool (login via Bonjour in Safari). For more details see the Release Notes for Firmware 01.02.12 available from the Western Digital webpage. After the firmware had been upgraded, the Western Digital disk was again available in Time Machine. After connecting, the Time Machine backup was finally working again.

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