Comment by throw0101c

19 hours ago

Time Capsule has been unsupported since 2018 (last shipped 2013):

* 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.

28 comments

throw0101c

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SebastianKra  9 minutes ago

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.

procaryote  2 hours ago

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

runlevel1  9 hours ago

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.

  • adastra22  4 hours ago

    Yeah I recently migrated my NAS and took the opportunity to switch from AFP to SMB for my Time Machine backups. There were so many problems like the ones you describe that I gave up and went back to AFP. Looks like I'm going to be forced to spend a weekend with Claude figuring this out.

TimTheTinker  19 hours ago

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

  • GeekyBear  18 hours ago

    It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.

    • wazoox  13 hours ago

      Yeah but AFP is still performing way better than SMB on Mac for any fast networking. Like 10GigE and faster. Apple SMB stack is a disaster, and thoroughly unprofessional. NFS is faster, too, but unfortunately the Finder, being the rat nest of bugs it is, has often trouble with NFS shares.

      7 replies →

bborud  6 hours ago

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.

giantrobot  19 hours ago

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