Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
"...if you have an Apple silicon Mac and AFP support is dropped from macOS 27, that would leave you unable to upgrade without replacing your network storage."
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
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
What I have done to maintain the integrity of my Time Machine backups (to UnRAID, via SMB):
For the "sparsebundles break" issue:
* Back up to multiple targets. I use both mbentley's Time Machine Docker image (only one backup per source machine) and UnRAID's built-in Time Machine functionality (multiple backups of same machine allowed).
* Use spaceinvader1's macinabox Docker image to have a local way to `fsck_apfs` the above sparsebundles.
* When one irreparably breaks, delete it and replace it with a copy of a working one from another of the above targets.
For the "backups are incredibly slow" issue:
* One of the above targets is to an SSD.
* Use TheTimeMachineMechanic's "Speed" option after a backup to determine the slow spots. Look at patterns in "Current:" lines. Pumping the output to an LLM is very helpful here.
Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…
…and yet 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, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
I’m reminded of that time 10-years ago when Apple rewrote parts of its networking code (discovery/mDNSResponder), and it caused so many issues they had to revert the code.
I'm still using my time capsule. I don't really trust the hard drive inside of it, but I basically use it to connect to an SSD that I attached to it. Unfortunately, Nest Wi-Fi, that I use as a router doesn't have any USBs, unlike some cheaper routers. I know that it's, I know that it will be gone after Tahoe. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about this. I mean, I don't really want to fool on us
I mean, it's basically just like a time machine backup plus, uh, a little bit of some older files that I don't want to keep on my main Mac.
seems like any NAS would take way more space than I would love to. I suppose one alternative would be actually getting some kind of like Beelink PC and then maybe setting up a proper home server, moving some of my side projects in there, running plex from it. The problem is that the current ram prices, it's a surprisingly expensive solution.
When i saw the headline I briefly allowed myself to hope that DNS settings would no longer be set universally (requiring manual intervention when switching networks if not using DHCP) but of course it's nothing useful and only "Apple is breaking stuff because they can"
In comparison to other 'changes' Apple usually do those one are realistic.
Dropping deprecated networking practices that worth upgrading (meaning, if you already have newer macOS clients mostly with apple stack, update your servers)
I just hope they won't break anything they don't need to break (which is more concerning usually) and that they won't drop other things that do make sense to keep until transitioned properly (eg. OpenGL as one example)
bought an m4 air last september, still haven’t gotten around to set up time machine to my linux homelab server due to the giant fucking headache the entire setup process is
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadHow big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule
I think there's some population of folks that have been doing NAS TM backups over AFP, and they'll now have to switch to SMB.
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
A backup of my 2TB MacBook literally takes weeks.
For the "sparsebundles break" issue:
* Back up to multiple targets. I use both mbentley's Time Machine Docker image (only one backup per source machine) and UnRAID's built-in Time Machine functionality (multiple backups of same machine allowed).
* Use spaceinvader1's macinabox Docker image to have a local way to `fsck_apfs` the above sparsebundles.
* When one irreparably breaks, delete it and replace it with a copy of a working one from another of the above targets.
For the "backups are incredibly slow" issue:
* One of the above targets is to an SSD.
* Use TheTimeMachineMechanic's "Speed" option after a backup to determine the slow spots. Look at patterns in "Current:" lines. Pumping the output to an LLM is very helpful here.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
…and yet 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, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.
I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.
> Networking changes coming in macOS 27
And yet:
> This year, with just over six weeks to go before that first beta of macOS 27, we already have two warnings of what might be coming.
> It repeated those warnings with macOS Sequoia 15.5, but still hasn’t confirmed when AFP will be lost.
> Although Apple carefully avoids being too specific, it warns that this change could come “as early as the next major software release”,
Seriously, no-one should still be using 1.1 since ... 5 years ago? It's not even the 1.2 -> 1.3 previous upgrade problems we're talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026192
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/30/apple-releases-os-x-10-...
Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to re-enable AFP [2].
1. https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk
2. https://xkcd.com/1172/
I mean, it's basically just like a time machine backup plus, uh, a little bit of some older files that I don't want to keep on my main Mac.
seems like any NAS would take way more space than I would love to. I suppose one alternative would be actually getting some kind of like Beelink PC and then maybe setting up a proper home server, moving some of my side projects in there, running plex from it. The problem is that the current ram prices, it's a surprisingly expensive solution.
I just hope they won't break anything they don't need to break (which is more concerning usually) and that they won't drop other things that do make sense to keep until transitioned properly (eg. OpenGL as one example)