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?

 

Time Machine setting is enabled, drive location is correct.
  Username/password appropriately configured. (I input the Read&Write username when setting up time machine.

 

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.

 

Time Machine is able to connect and requests login info. This is the info created and shown above in "Secure Sharing."

 

Connection is clearly successful, as it detects the backup created the very first time I got TimeMachine to work on this hard drive.

 

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?

 

After at least 5 minutes of attempting to connect, it throws this error.