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I gave up on timecapsule because performance has gotten worse and worse year over year. I replaced it with a periodic rsync backup to a NAS that is in turn backed up in other ways

The upside is that it's dead simple when it comes to how the backup is stored. In 10 years time, having files in a filesystem will still work, but I imagine restoring an old time machine backup will require quite a bit of work

If you wanted to you could probably figure out how to do apfs snapshots before rsyncing

If you exclude pointless stuff like browser caches it's also pretty performant compared to timecapsule, and the transfer is properly encrypted

I still use AFP on my NAS for a few reasons:

1. When I benchmarked it, AFP was significantly faster than SMB. Both with SMB2 and SMB3. Even when transport encryption was turned off.

2. On SMB2+, symlinks created by the client are not real symlinks. They're "Minshall+French" links which only look like symlinks to other SMB2+ clients. To the server and NFS mounts they look like flat files with the target path encoded in them.

3. It exposes a different precision for certain timestamps. Software that uses this metadata to decide whether a file needs to be updated will see almost every file as needing a resync.

It's been a year or two since I checked the status of these. The situation may have improved since last I looked.

Have they, by chance, also fixed the issue where MacOs' SMB implementation is unusably slow when copying many small files?

A backup of my 2TB MacBook literally takes weeks.

They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).

Did they ever work? No, seriously. I've had a couple of them and the few times I really could have used them I discovered that they represented the worst backup solution I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. Slow, very hard to use beyond their primary integration with the OS (which isn't good to begin with), there's really no good way to keep an eye on how they are doing (what's actually backed up, if it is still there) and the performance is worse than any hand rolled solution I've ever used.

They never supported it properly in the first place and then it just meh'ed out of existence.

I hope "the new Apple" is going to take software seriously.

Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.

"Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior. I can run the latest Linux kernel and still have access to an internal floppy disk drive if I wanted to, yet billion dollar companies can't seem to manage to support 10 year old stuff.

I still am sore from when I "upgraded" macOS and suddenly support for my 1080i TV was gone. Yesterday it worked fine, today it's gone. All because they can't be bothered to maintain a code path.

Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.

wasn't it capped at 3tb? is the drive swappable to something bigger? They discontinues them in 2018, the wifi in them is old, single disk (no raid).. better to just pick up a multidrive nas or use cloud backups. What we should be asking for is timemachine backends for cloud providers.

That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware.

I have colleagues who are running AFP on BSD for continuous backups on their systems, and they have to reconfigure something new to be able to continue backing up their systems.

Netatalk has been around for like 25 years: https://github.com/Netatalk/Netatalk

Relevant to the discussion is that the project comes with an AFP client as well. I have no experience with the client but I've used the Netatalk server for more than 15 years.

Longer than that, even. A similar requirement for iOS apps was in the cards 10 years ago. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=12212016b

(Yes, this article is about an extension of the deadline. I don't remember what happened after that.)

Yes this one seems unambiguously a good idea

Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?

Even ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.

Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.

The "quality" Apple delivers is by now a complete joke. It's going south since over a decade, and this never stopped.

It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.

So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.

It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.

I stopped using it because the interface was wretched and it didn't need to be cutesy. Rsync found it's way back into the tool belt.

i wonder if support for DIY backup tools isn't prioritized when a future iCloud monthly subscription will be pushed eventually.

Other issues with Time Machine:

- Very slow, even on an M4.

- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts

- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)

- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.

- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe

On an unrelated note

If you know it's unrelated, why try to derail this discussion? Why not start another? What's the point?

Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs, instead of being judged on its own merits?

Makes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol

They’re possibly dropping a protocol they’ve been saying they’d drop for years, and tightening connection validation.

This is nothing like the mDNS stuff.

Unless I'm mixing it up, I still remember this as the infamous "wifi update"

I originally added a different title: Apple is dropping AFP/TimeMachine support in macOS 27.

It seems like somehow got overwritten to the original title of the post.

Nevertheless, knowing Apple so far, unless _some_ large-enterprise~y customer comes and objects, they will drop the support. We already know Intel support is dropping. Why not clean up rest of the things from the kernel and the userspace?

I was also surprised by this. The post appears to contain next to no actual information.

The facts: Apple put a warning in macOS 15.5 that AFP support might be dropped in the future.

The claim: AFP support will be dropped in macOS 27.

I just do not see how you get from the facts to the claim. This is just complete speculation.

I'm more surprised they made it the default... with a Unix backend, why didn't they improve/expand nfs?

> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue

That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:

  defaults read com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores
  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!

Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.

Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.

Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.

How is nfs on mac?

Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.

I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.

You greatly under-estimate how much work it is to maintain old code, particularly to maintain in securely.

AFP and Time Capsules add attack vectors to the OS, which can be targeted even when few users actively using them. One dev could keep both basically functional, but to what end? User counts are already small, and people that aren't using them are still exposed by their mere existence.

Shrinking or removing code, in my experience, is one of the biggest single wins you can have in software development. Less to test, less to update, less to secure.

No, afp is application layer. It doesn't matter how the device is connected at layers 1 or 2.

You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.

Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.

TFA:

> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.

I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.

They switched the default protocol from AFP to SMB a long time ago.

They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.

The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience

People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.

As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.

I would have agreed if they hadn't put in the engineering effort to upgrade the backup disk image to APFS instead of HFS+. They wouldn't have done that if the plan was to deprecate it soon. (IIRC the next version of macOS is also dropping HFS+ support)

Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.

I like having control over my backups.

I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.

Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...

https://github.com/lookfirst/ResticScheduler

The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.

This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.

> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!

The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).

Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.

What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.

Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.

Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing

macOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.

Must have been a lot of years ago since Samba was introduced in Jaguar (2002), and SMB replaced AFP as the default for file sharing as of Mavericks (2013).

It's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.