Over at TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman reports that Apple is not supporting the use of hard drives attached to the AirPort Extreme as a Time Machine backup device:

Apple confirmed for me last week that a feature for using hard drives attached via USB to an AirPort Extreme Base Station is an unsupported feature. The company declined to provide further information. This feature was available in the betas of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, as has been widely reported, but was removed from the public Leopard feature list and from the shipping version of the operating system. Apple had been working on providing me a definitive statement since my review of Time Capsule for Macworld was published on 21-Mar-08.

It’s time for Apple to get off the pot on this.

AirPort Disk Time Machine backup was a feature, if not THE feature, that enticed many to upgrade to a new wireless router. Somewhere along the line, though, Apple seems to have changed its strategy to pushing Time Capsule.

Backups are too important for Apple to be treating them as an unsupported use with AirPort Extreme. For many people, their computer represents a large portion of their lives. Mac users, especially, are likely to have their photos, movies, podcasts and other huge files on their computers.

Apple needs to support this feature or officially kill it, so that Mac users can make informed decisions about their backup strategy.