Scott,
You came over several weeks ago and set up my Lacie external harddrive among other things.  I just got a notice that the backups are not working, and in trying to figure it out, cannot find the external harddrive anywhere.  Didn't you hook it all up?  Was there a reason you didn't?  Was it not working??
Thanks!

Since Time Machine is so easy to set up I’m sure we initiated the startup. You may want to check a few things. First, check to see if there is a “last backed up” date in the menu bar. Click on the airport radar icon in the menu bar and it should say one of a few messages:

last backup failed....this means the relationship to the drive has been severed for some reason and may need to be reinitiated.
last backup delayed....means the process was stopped in the middle of the transfer of data and should be able to be restarted.
not setup yet....means you need to go to system prefs and then to time machine prefs then start the process for the first time.
last backed up mm/dd/yy time. This is the best message which means things are good. It should reflect the most recent hour of connectivity.

As far as the external hard drive goes, I can’t recall what method we were using but there are two ways to use time machine.

1. a hard drive directly connected to the mac via a cable
2. time capsule wireless backup with your apple router

Hope this can get you pointed in the right direction. Please let me know.