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

RAID sounds so romantic and wonderful -- until you live with it through a drive failure and learn ALL about it. RAID can be really useful for "always-available" processing. But it comes with some serious compromises. As you know, RAID is NOT backup.

[in my opinion] most users would be far better served by dedicating multiple drives to multiple independent backups. That is what I have implemented as well.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

RAID sounds so romantic and wonderful -- until you live with it through a drive failure and learn ALL about it. RAID can be really useful for "always-available" processing. But it comes with some serious compromises. As you know, RAID is NOT backup.

I’ve been using RAID for $NUMERIC_OVERFLOW years, including many recoveries.

RAID is handy when the disk fails though, and disks can fail a sector or a spindle at a time, or an entire array. Under nothing, or under an important file.

Yep. RAID is not (usually) a backup. But it can be. I’ve used RAID-1 as a backup, by rotating disks out of the array for local or off-site backup, and re-merging the returning disks, or re-merging new “empty” disks. That usually with three or more volumes in the RAID-1, and a RAID controller that’s not, um, untalented.

[in my opinion] most users would be far better served by dedicating multiple drives to multiple independent backups. That is what I have implemented as well.

Just a Box Of Disks. JBOD.

But I’m not a big fan of a nest of USB devices and cables which can result from that.

Time Machine backups to a few JBOD disks works well as an alternative, though. Or Time Machine to two RAID pools, if there are enough Macs and enough of a budget.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

RAID sounds so romantic and wonderful -- until you live with it through a drive failure and learn ALL about it. RAID can be really useful for "always-available" processing.

With really large drives, a rebuild could take a while. You can get 3.5" mechanical hard drives with capacities as high as 24 TB (each). 150 MB/s is a good transfer rate for a mechanical hard drive. I believe I calculated that it would take over 44 hours to transfer 24 TB of data, running continuously flat out at that rate.

One thing you absolutely don't want to do is to put a hard drive which uses Shingled Magnetic Recording into a RAID. These drives store data in such a way that when you rewrite one sector, you may destroy data next to it, forcing the system to save and rewrite the data in that area, and so forth, and so on. This absolutely tanks the speed of doing a RAID rebuild and makes it much more likely that the RAID will suffer another failure before the rebuild can complete – if it completes at all.

I'm not very techy, so I need some translation. I use an old but still works airport at my office to connect to the interneat and a time capsule at home to connet and use the backup at home. Do I need to buy something new? Will these devices still allow me to connect to the internet, or is this just backup? I'm not even sure what to ask! If I still want the backup, what do I need to get to continue that? Please keep this in very much lay terms. Thank you. P.S. I do not know what AFB is or NS, or whatever the initials mean. I just want to know what I need to get to continue connecting to the internet and to continue backing up my computer. Again, Thank You!!

2) Invest in a new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and connect it to your current router. Upside.....you won't have to connect a hard drive directly to a Mac to back up. Downside.....significant expense for a NAS, and Apple does not offer this type of product.

OR,

3) If you have a spare older Mac, do what I did and use it as a Time Machine backup destination using an advanced feature of Mac File Sharing over your network.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/16/shared-time-machine-folder-mac-backups/

Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

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Patricia Podolec wrote:

I'm not very techy, so I need some translation. I use an old but still works airport at my office to connect to the interneat and a time capsule at home to connet and use the backup at home. Do I need to buy something new? Will these devices still allow me to connect to the internet, or is this just backup?

This just affects using a disk drive that is part of, or attached to, a Time Capsule or an AirPort base station. You will still be able to use Time Capsule or Airport base station as a Wi-Fi router.

Note that Wi-Fi radio and security standards have evolved over time.

The earliest AirPort base station only had an 802.11b ("up to 11 Mbps") radio, and only supported WEP security. WEP is basically no security; people discovered ways to crack it in less than a minute. A quick browse through MacTracker suggests that all other AirPort base stations, and all Time Capsules, support WPA2. WPA2 isn't the latest security standard (that would be WPA3), but it is better than WPA and much better than WEP.

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

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?

<<

• 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.

>>

Since we are attempting to show ALL alternatives, even ones you may not wish to consider, another alternative is using a Mac on your network as a Shared Time Machine destination. Setup requires that Mac be running High Sierra or later:

3) If you have a spare older Mac, do what I did and use it as a Time Machine backup destination using an advanced feature of Mac File Sharing over your network.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/16/shared-time-machine-folder-mac-backups/

Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

I’ve got data on my Time Capsule that I don’t want to lose. Does this mean that i need to do one or more of:

• copy all data off the Time Capsule to something more modern.
• remove the Time Capsule hard drive and put it into an external drive case. Will TC still function as a router/AP without a hard drive?
• keep the capability of running an older version of MacOS

before upgrading MacOS.

copy all data off the Time Capsule to something more modern.

Connect a hard drive to the USB port on the Time Capsule and use the Archive function in AirPort Utility to copy all of the data on the Time Capsule drive over to the hard drive. The drive needs to be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) aka HFS+

Once you have the data copied over, you can connect the USB hard drive directly to your Mac and get at the data that way. Do not expect to keep backing up to the same file though. It might work, and might not. If you try this, Time Machine will likely start a complete new backup file and then move forward from there.

remove the Time Capsule hard drive and put it into an external drive case

That is an option, but getting into a product that was never designed to be serviced is difficult. Plus, that hard drive is probably 6-7 years old or older.

Will TC still function as a router/AP without a hard drive?

Yes, but as a router it is behind the times in terms of performance and security. There has not been a security update for 5-6 years.

keep the capability of running an older version of MacOS

That would work and allow Time Machine to keep backing up to the Time Capsule.

Thanks for the follow up. I put a 4TB IronWolf drive in mine 4 years ago and I’m pretty sure I can get it back out - especially if I’m not really concerned about the cosmetics of something that is probably going to recycling.

Please be advised that this human being will no longer support the apple corporation and its shareholders- I won’t be updating my OS and will continue to use time capsule and after decades of using these products my next computer will be a PC

Annoyedmacuser196 wrote:

Please be advised that this human being will no longer support the apple corporation and its shareholders- I won’t be updating my OS and will continue to use time capsule and after decades of using these products my next computer will be a PC

Readers here want you to be able to use the best solutions available to you, whatever Brand that may be.

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Product Feedback - Apple

Annoyedmacuser196 wrote:

Please be advised that this human being will no longer support the apple corporation and its shareholders- I won’t be updating my OS and will continue to use time capsule and after decades of using these products my next computer will be a PC

if Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD or any other choice serves your needs better, by all means use that.

Buy whatever best meets your needs.

For your case here, you can start using Windows 10 immediately with an Intel Mac too, using Boot Camp.

Install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp Assistant - Apple Support

Note: Microsoft has a TPM as a prerequisite for Windows 11 support, which greatly reduced the numbers of existing PCs that could update to Windows 11. Mac with Intel is not among those PCs with a TPM. (So you’ll need new hardware there, once you want to run Windows 11.)

If you’d like to provide your feedback to those people that work for Apple, the Apple corporate 408 phone number is here: Contact - How to Contact Us - Apple