Any ideas why my Airport Extreme identifies itself as a Time Capsule in Time Machine? I recently noticed that Time Machine on both my Macs (Mountain Lion, 10.8.3) seem to think that my Airport Extreme base station (AEBS) + USB hard drive is actually a Time Capsule. Screenshots below. BTW, I asked this question on the official support status of AEBS + USB HDD, but this question is different (though related)

Question: Why does Time Machine (on Mountain Lion) think that an AEBS with an external HFS+ USB drive is a Time Capsule? I don't recall doing anything special but are there some special settings that "make it so"? 



TM thinks it's backing to a Time Capsule





TM performing a backup to the USB HDD (HFS+) attached to the AEBS
Apple only supports backup to Time Capsule, so the wording there is a constant and not something designed to know it's not backing up to Time Capsule as opposed to an actual server or directly connected drive.

You can test this (since I doubt they recently changed course on this with an update) by connecting a totally new drive to the Airport Extreme, wipe the drive from AirPort Utility and then try to set up Time Machine to back up to that newly erased drive.


Time Machine doesn't back up to AirPort Extreme AirPort Disks