Forum Discussion
Connecting a Hard Drive to my Gateway Router
Is it possible to configure the gateway to allow network access to a hard drive plugged into the USB port so that I can set up TimeMachine on my Mac? Thank you. Bill Arnold tucsonbil
I can't say for sure, but I believe it's highly unlikely. A remote TimeMachine backup destination is sort of a server, not simply a remote disk.
FWIW, you could pick up a used recent Mac Mini, attach that to your gateway, and plug your external drive into the Mini.
David:
Thank you for your response. This question (and various iterations) has gone unanswered/unresponded to by T-Mobile for many years. I had an Apple Airport (now bricked) that the external drive used for Timemachine worked seamlessly on ... Anyway ...
To your suggestion - Attaching a Mac Mini to the Gateway. I don't know what benefit would come from that (it appears that the USB is a "power only" port). A mini is corded/120V powered, no? I'd have to figure out how to get my MacBook to talk over the network to the mini for the time machine function to work.
I was thinking of an ethernet connection but a good WiFi connection could work, at least for some use cases.
But it's likely that there is at least one ethernet jack on your T-Mobile gateway. The more recent Minis may not come with ethernet, but I believe you could buy an adapter to plug into a USB-C port on the Mini.
Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend doing TimeMachine backups using 2 WiFi hops (MacBook to gateway and gateway to Mini) if you can avoid it, but it could work reasonably well with solid WiFi connections if the volume of files/data is modest.
