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I'm trying to use a LaCie 2TB drive as an AirPort drive, for backup on a home network. We have one mac and two PC laptops.

My plan is to create a Mac partition and a Windows partition. However, Disk Utility won't let me set the windows partition to Windows format; there's no option in the menu for it in the partition tab. Am I doing something wrong?

Alternatively, is there a way to partition the drive with one partition that all three machines can see? We have a Mac G5 with 10.4 and two laptops with Windows 7.

Update:

I've formatted the disk with one big Mac partition, and both of the Windows PCs and Mac can see and write to it. The Mac is currently doing a whole-disk backup using Synk Standard. (It's a first backup and has been going for over a day and a half, but seems to be making progress.)

Darth, thanks again for the heads-up about security. I've researched this further, and the questions to ask in this case seem to be [1] is the disk password-protected (it is), and [2] Is the AirPort using WEP or WPA (It's using WPA/WPA 2 "Personal").

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If you are connecting to the drive over the network, then the format should not matter - The system (AirPort) to which the drive is connected simply needs to be able to read it, for which I would format it as one large HFS+ partition. From there the files are encapsulated to the machines via various networking protocols, which both the windows and mac machines can use.

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Thanks. I'm having trouble configuring things so I can see the drive on my Win7 netbook. Is there an AirPort Extreme for idiots document somewhere on the web? I can't believe I'm the only one to have these questions! – neilfein Jun 13 '10 at 3:17
I think I may have found the problem. I had to enable "Share disks over WAN" and disable "Share disks over internet using Bonjour", and I was able to log into the drive from the netbook. Thanks again. – neilfein Jun 13 '10 at 3:44
@neilfein Careful, if there's not a router or something between your Airport Extreme and the internet (your modem or whatever), then Sharing over WAN could expose the disk to the entire internet. – Darth Android Jun 13 '10 at 5:25
I thought the Air Port had a firewall that disallowed this? – neilfein Jun 14 '10 at 18:33
In router terms, the firewall sits between the WAN and the LAN/Wifi. Sharing over WAN means you're sharing on the public side of the firewall as well as the private side. – Darth Android Jun 14 '10 at 22:47
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Use Dropbox, it'll propagate your files across all of the computers (no matter what OS) and give you an online backup in case disaster strikes (like a fire).

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We've settled on a combination of network backup for long-term backup storage and Dropbox for quickly-changing day-to-day stuff. – neilfein Oct 31 '11 at 1:19
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