Speaking of backups, OWC has a blog entry detailing some of the dangers of performing Time Machine backups onto a USB drive connected to a AirPort base station.

They do not work reliably – it may work at first but they are NOT RECOMMENDED. I tried doing it at home on my wife's machine and had to cease. Worked fine for a month or more and then stopped working – would always fail backing up after that.

I put the same drive on my Mac mini entertainment center, set it as her backup volume, and it’s been rock solid since.

I have experienced similar issues using an AirPort Extreme’s AirDisk as the destination for my Time Machine backups. At first everything was alright. My Mac created a disk image on the drive connected to my AirPort Extreme, and proceeded to make copies of all my files onto that image. Modifications were saved in the usual way, and the restoration of specific files using Time Machine’s Galaxy UI proceeded without a hitch. Then after a couple of days of seamless backups the Time Machine disk image on the AirDisk got corrupted without warning and refused to accept any additional data. Luckily for me the contents of my would be “air backup” were recoverable, but in order to keep using Time Machine on AirDisk the entire backup process would have to be started again from scratch. Many others have suffered the same fate. This is not the kind of backup you want your data to rely on.

My recommendation? Pony up the price of a Time Capsule for responsible wireless backups of multiple Macs, or purchase a reliable external drive for tethered backups of a single Mac. When it comes to archiving your data you don’t want your backup method to be a hack.