Howdy folks,
I'm trying to set up a SanDisk Extreme 4TB Portable Hard Drive, connected via USB to my Archer AX55, for Time Machine backups on my computer. I can get the router to recognize the hard drive and share it, and I can connect to the hard drive at-will using Finder. So, not an issue there.
But Time Machine can never connect to it after initial set up. I got it to connect the very first time I ever set it up, and the backup started, but after a while the connection was lost and it never finished. Since then, I can't get Time Machine to successfully back up to it. It always throws an error that the connection cannot be made. Meanwhile, I have no issues connecting to the hard drive as if it were on a file server. Any suggestions?
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/e834b5433f044f2a80f45a5f9904b437.png)
Time Machine setting is enabled, drive location is correct.
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/09893526186149478aab7f39e22c7cf7.png)
Username/password appropriately configured. (I input the Read&Write username when setting up time machine.
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/57925e8b61e54e91a5f6273414512290.png)
BackupTM (which is automatically created/named when you enable the Time Machine setting on the router, I presume?) is found and selected as the backup disk.
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/899097e172f040639c1646cd5a5edc7a.png)
Time Machine is able to connect and requests login info. This is the info created and shown above in "Secure Sharing."
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/1632b862879047e1ac4237844f793587.png)
Connection is clearly successful, as it detects the backup created the very first time I got TimeMachine to work on this hard drive.
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/f77aa4b519464b04a43314412a232504.png)
The blue bar cycles for quite a while (at least 5 minutes), while it says "Connecting to backup disk..." (Note, this is immediately after all the prior screenshots. No idea how or why the connection isn't already made?
![](https://static-community.tp-link.com/other/7/5/2023/9f11100fbbe44cc79f55a130c304f99b.png)
After at least 5 minutes of attempting to connect, it throws this error.