I bought a new router back in July, a Netgear WNDR3700-100NAS. It has a USB port that can be used to share a USB hard drive on the local network. I’d been meaning to use that, but just never got around to hooking a drive up. Well, I finally started playing around with it last week, using a 1TB MyBook drive that has been sitting in a box on my floor since November 2009 (long story). I didn’t quite manage to get it working then. (Another long story.)
I tried again today. I didn’t get it working at first, so I tried to upgrade the firmware on the router, thinking that would help. I couldn’t manage to get that done, at first, but I hit upon the brilliant idea of power cycling the router, and that allowed me to finally download and install the new firmware. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?“)
With the new firmware, I had much more luck. The router recognized the drive, I could browse to it on my desktop PC, and I even managed to connect to it from my MacBook.
I think I’m done with this for the night, but I’m hoping to try backing up my MacBook to it at some point, maybe next weekend. I really need to start doing backups again.