Time Machine will no longer support Time Capsule formatted with AFP Apple Filing Protocol

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

…As long as there is a way to create a Sparse Bundle Disk Image file, the drive format is a "don't care". If Time Machine can see and use that sparse bundle disk image file, Samba v3 or better is the protocol Apple is using for servers going forward.

A typo, there. It’s Server Message Block SMB 3.0 required. Samba is one of the implementations of SMB. Among other implementations, SMB 3.0 is supported by with Windows 8, Windows 2012, Samba 4.2, and later.

And yeah, the particular Time Machine server file system doesn’t matter to the Time Machine client, past basic file systems functions. I’m currently using a mix of not-Apple file systems, depending on the particular NAS server.

Time Capsule has been deprecated. I got over it. Options are to replace Time Capsule with a new high speed WiFi router and use iCloud as your backup even though it may not provide 100% of the backup protection you might wish to have or to do research on alternative backup drives that will work with the Time Machine app remotely via WiFi or hardwired via a connection that will work with your Apple device that you wish to backup. Change is constant in life. Sometimes old things are lost that are better than the new things. Other times the new things are a lot better. Manual to electric typewriters to word processing machines to personal computers to laptop, pad and phone devices come to mind. Soon no one will type as A.I. will advance the voice audio interfaces to be able to understand anyone and everyone no matter their accent or speech impediment. Life is full of change.

<< and use iCloud as your backup ... >>

"On the cloud" is great for sharing photos, but is not a viable backup solution for everything you have. The stuff is not under your control, and is subject to sloppy handling, arbitrary changes in policy, theft, accidental deletion, data loss [are they making frequent backups using best practices?], and discontinuation or throttling of the service. It can easily take three days to restore it at ordinary Internet speeds.

NOT iCloud. And Not DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive, or GoogleDrive, or any other Cloud backup services as your PRIMARY backup method.

You can connect a locally-attached drive. Certain third-party Routers can support a connected drive, AND support the required features for Time Machine.

As has been suggested many times on this discussion, you can use another Mac to store your backups on another device on your network, or invest in a different third-party Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

…

I continue to use an old Mac as my network backup destination. (Requires MacOS X 10.13 High Sierra or later on the old Mac.) The other criterion is that it be almost-always available.

As an alternative, TrueNAS works with x86-64 hardware, too.

This job is not taxing in terms of compute power or I/O power, so many current or older Macs could be pressed into service for this job.

Definitely. Network bottlenecks are probably going to be a factor earlier than processing too, whether that’s due to a slow Wi-Fi connection, or contention at the NAS, or Fast Ethernet gear as can be found in older configurations.

Having many drives connected is superior in that it allows for creating multiple backup destinations for each Mac to be backed up. And these can be spread across different drives for improved availability on case of drive failure.

Apropos of nothing, best pick RAID 6 over RAID 5.

RAID 5 can have a nasty habit of imploding during a rebuild, due to a second error.

In case anyone is following along, I bought:

• UGreen DXP2800 2 bay NAS (new player in NAS, good hardware value, software shaping up).
• WD Red Pro 4TB drive (basic disk, no RAID yet).
• UGreen 2.5G 5-port switch
• UGreen 2.5G usb-c to ethernet adapter

The upgrade to 2.5G ethernet at my desk wasn't strictly necessary, but I wanted to get completely off the Time Capsule and I couldn't justify going any faster (DXP2800 has a single 2.5G ethernet port).

I originally bought the WD Red Pro to hang off my ASUS CT-8 router for Time Machine backups, but that felt a bit janky - I needed to use my admin Router password for disk access and I had some issues with the drive going to sleep. I could have probably worked through that, but went a different path.

I was able to keep the old Time Capsule sparse bundle with minimal complications (Time Machine said the backup was in use, but some restarts cleared that up). YMMV, but tmutil might help with keeping an old sparse bundle.

 sudo tmutil inheritbackup {machine_directory | sparsebundle}

An older Mac can act as a Time machine "Server" on your network as well.

It only needs to be running MacOS 10.13 High Sierra, the first version of MacOS that supports specifying multiple Shared Time Machine Destinations. Connect some drives as Shared backup destinations, and connect to your network and you are ready to back up across the network.

Use a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

camulligan wrote:

I wonder why Apple does not want customers to be able to have backups run in the background over a network.

NAS with Time Machine server is supported for remote backups.

AFP and SMBv1 (and devices limited to same) are not, in an upcoming macOS release.

What to look for? A NAS with Time Machine server support.

I’ve listed two commercial NAS vendors, and an open source NAS project, above.

More generally, running SMBv1 is an invitation for a Very Bad Day.

The issues with SMBv1 are not new, either:

• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/filecab/stop-using-smb1/425858

Just to summarize, to ensure I that understand the situation correctly:

• Apple will drop support for AFP in macOS 27 which is to be released in 2026. So we've got essentially one year to solve the Time Capsule problem.
• Time Machine with Time Capsule is currently able to perform automatic, incremental backups for multiple devices connected to it via LAN or Wi-Fi.
• The goal is to replace the Time Capsule with devices that perform similar automatic backup functions and ideally to upgrade the Wi-Fi to the newest protocols, such as Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be).
• Requirements:
  • Purchase a router that supports a newer Wi-Fi standard (e.g. 802.11be).
  • If the router has a USB port, connect a backup disk to it, provided that the router supports the SMBv3 protocol.
  • Alternatively, purchase an NAS with SMBv3 support and connect it to the router via LAN.

Questions:

1. 1. Is the summary above correct?
   2. How would one know if the USB port on a router supports the SMBv3 protocol? Any examples of 802.11be routers which do?
   3. Can the backups on the HDD or NAS be encrypted (in case the device gets stolen and ends up in the wrong hands, so the data on it cannot be read)?
   4. Can the existing sparsebundle file from the Time Capsule be transferred to the backup HDD or NAS, so that the historical backups are not lost?

Having no backups at all is exceptionally inconvenient after a problem develops.

I know this because I am a developer-type and from time-to-time I manage to crash out my main Mac in a way that eliminates all my data.

To get an idea what that would REALLY mean, I suggest you create a new, Blank account on your Mac, and use it for a day without referring to anything on your old account.

log in to a web site? sorry, your passwords are not available.

check an email from last week? sorry, not saved and not available.

send an email to anyone? sorry, their address is unknown.

check back on documents you set aside? sorry, they are gone.

Although you may not need 3-2-1 backups for non-business data, having a backup really is superior.

Allow me to suggest some simple alternatives to NONE:

• Once a week, walk around and connect a local drive to each Mac in your household and allow Time Machine (or any other method you prefer) to make a backup. One drive backs up one computer.

• designate ONE computer on your network to be a shared backup destination, and connect some larger drives to it for over-the-air automatic backups using Time Machine or another method you prefer. One big drive can handle several computers, but has no redundancy. Several drives with backups split across them is superior.

what model NETGEAR Router? Does it have a USB port that can support one or several external drives?

If it does, it may be able to replace your Time Capsule with a similar capability. I am sure Readers could help with configuring that if it can be done.

Michael9009 wrote:

Before investing in a NAS, would a LAN-to-USB device exist for which, if connected to a router/switch, the USB would support SMB v3, so a backup HDD would work with Time Machine?

That LAN-to-USB device would be a NAS.

Probably easier to connect the HDD directly to the Mad, though.

If yes, this would solve, at least temporarily, my Time Machine wireless backup situation - i.e. Mac -> Wi-Fi AP -> Router/Switch -> LAN-to-USB -> HDD - after I decommission the Time Capsule.

You’ll need a NAS vendor that supports external USB and SMB file services, and Time Machine server, then.

Closest match I’m aware of adds Wi-Fi to what you seek, such as the Synology mesh and routers mentioned above. Those connect to the LAN, and have a USB available for external connections.

TL;DR: probably easiest, wire the HDD directly to the Mac. And a Mac can also act as a NAS.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Apple File System (APFS), a file system for macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS, currently being developed and deployed by Apple Inc.

Apple Filing Protocol

The Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), formerly AppleTalk Filing Protocol, is a proprietary network protocol, and part of the Apple File Service (AFS), that offers file services for macOS, classic Mac OS, and Apple II computers. In OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and earlier, AFP was the primary protocol for file services.

Starting with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Server Message Block (SMB) was made the primary file sharing protocol, with the ability to run an AFP server removed later in macOS 11 Big Sur[1] and the client being marked for deprecation in the 15.5 update of macOS Sequoia.[2] AFP supports Unicode file names, POSIX and access-control list permissions, resource forks, named extended attributes, and advanced file locking.

from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol

cash12 wrote:

I've had a Wifi 5 time capsule for a few years now that I used for file sharing. About a month ago I upgraded it from a 2tb drive to a 6tb WD Red for my time machine backups, but now I can't do that?? Sad :(

Apple has been displaying informational messages about the upcoming deprecation of AFP for a while, and the recommended alternative SMB has been available for several macOS releases; since macOS 10.14 or so. Maybe earlier.

SMB and Time Machine server support can operate via most functional network connections, including your Wi-Fi 5 and the current Wi-Fi 7, or via wired Ethernet.

Options and alternatives for implementing Time Machine server are discussed throughout this thread.

MrHoffman wrote:

More generally, running SMBv1 is an invitation for a Very Bad Day.

A quick search suggests that the flaws of SMB version 1 include

• No encryption at all, even for authentication credentials. This could be really bad if combined with a really old version of Wi-Fi where Wi-Fi-level encryption is either absent, or too weak to pose any real barriers to the Bad Guys. (I think I read once that WEP can sometimes be cracked in under a minute.)
• Susceptible to replay attacks
• Susceptible to denial of service attacks

Using SMB version 1 to transfer data you care about would thus be somewhat like leaving the door to your house unlocked, and hoping that no thieves discovered how very easy it was to get in.

For a clear explanation of EXACTLY how Time Machine works its magic, nothing beats the late James Pond's illustrated guide, still completely applicable and still available from Mirror sites many years after his death.

This section of the guide is six pages, linked with the "Next" button at the bottom of each page. sparse bundles are discussed on page four of six. This is a direct link to that page:

The normal Backups.backupdb folder used to store local backups (see How Local Backups are Stored) can't be placed and used directly on a network drive.  

When backups are made over a network (Ethernet or wireless), the Backups.backupdb folder is placed inside a rather odd container called a sparse bundle disk image.  A disk image is kind of like a disk-within-a-disk -- it has its own format, directories, etc. Thus the format may be different from the format of the disk it's on.  See the blue box below for more details.

Unlike backups made locally, there's a separate sparse bundle for each Mac, named for and identified to that Mac. You can see the sparse bundle(s) via the Finder -- connect to the server, then click on the disk/partition name (Finder in Column View).

How Time Machine Works its Magic: How backups are stored in Sparse Bundles