Major HT to James B and Jon for helping debug this one in the comments. Note, that with El Capitan the option now simply reads MS-DOS (Fat). Change the drive formats to be “MS-DOS (Fat32)” and verify that they are being created using the “Master Boot Record” scheme (under options). Next launch the Disk Utility tool, select the USB drive, and click the “Partition” tab.Ĭhange the drop down from “Current” to whatever partition scheme you want (I’m using two). We have to repartition the drive, and you’ll lose everything. The first step is to plug in your USB drive and backup any data you may want to keep on your USB drive. However, ReadyShare DOES support Fat32 and we can make this work on OSX. According to some various discussion threads, the AFP protocol changed somewhere in Lion and there’s still no support since Netgear does some custom interaction with the shares. According to the documentation, the router is supposed to be able to support OSX Extented (Journaled) partitions, but I could never get them to show up. Getting things to work for you may vary slightly based on drive/hardware, but I this approach should work. I have a Netgear DGND3700v2 DSL Modem / Router (N600) with firmware version 1.1.00.12_1.00.12NA and a Western Digital Elements 1.5 TB Drive. I’m running a MacBookPro with Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.3). Mount it, and then set that to be your Time Machine backup source. From there, create a sparse bundled disc image on the partition for your Time Machine backup. Use Fat32 (might be listed as simply FAT in newer versions of Disk Utility) partitions for all your partitions since the router will be able to read them. TL DR (For those of you that want the quick fix) After some digging and tweaking, I managed to make it work. This allowed you to plug a USB drive into it and have it shared across all your computers in the network (music, photos, backup, etc.) However, their documentation to get it to work with OSX’s Time Machine backup tool wasn’t working.

Over the weekend I purchased a Netgear DGND3700v2 DSL Modem / Router (N600) and discovered that there was a great feature called ReadyShare. If you do run into problems (I did later on), I have some notes below to help. You shouldn’t run into any trouble if you decide to upgrade. Note: I just upgraded to OSX Mavericks (10.9) and the ReadyShare drive is still readable and functional in Time Machine.

Timemachineeditor github