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#macos#machine#apple#support#smb#backups#afp#old#file#since

Discussion (80 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ndisnabout 1 hour ago
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.
amlutoabout 1 hour ago
Even ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.
adjejmxbdjdn7 minutes ago
A couple of revisions in Time Machine was just fine.

The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).

However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.

Hamuko8 minutes ago
The worst feature of Time Machine is how it takes over every single display you have. Even though it only shows content on one screen, it feels the need to completely black out the others.
jshierabout 1 hour ago
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.
giwookabout 1 hour ago
Makes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol
kjuice1about 1 hour ago
Are you thinking of Time Capsule? Time Machine is fully supported and I use it every day on Tahoe.
throw0101cabout 3 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.

TimTheTinkerabout 3 hours ago
They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
GeekyBearabout 2 hours ago
It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB for file sharing and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.
giantrobotabout 3 hours ago
Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.
Melatonicabout 2 hours ago
SMB1 has major security issues but even those ignored (which a lot of people on private home networks shouldn't be too worried about) it's also slow as hell on MacOS
stackskiptonabout 3 hours ago
SMB2 came out with Vista and SMB3 was Win8 so they are not new protocols either.
winocmabout 2 hours ago
That just ended up inadvertently reminding me, Windows Vista is actually almost old enough to be at the minimum legal drinking age in the US.

Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.

Time really does fly.

wtallisabout 3 hours ago
Where "new" in this case could be a NAS running Samba from 2011? Samba added official support for Time Machine much later, but I think it was possible on earlier versions with some extra steps.
pvtmertabout 3 hours ago
Although TimeCapsule is more than decade old, it serves nicely with TimeMachine (automatic backups). Sad to see that going away permanently for Apple Silicon.
ryandrakeabout 2 hours ago
"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.

_verandaguyabout 2 hours ago
The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.

With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.

With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.

goaliecaabout 3 hours ago
Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.
swiftcoderabout 3 hours ago
It may not be the easiest surgery in the world, but you can replace the hard drive in a Time Capsule. You'll probably want to replace the power supply too after this much time
kgwgkabout 3 hours ago
Disks can be replaced.
sleepybrettabout 3 hours ago
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.
TimTheTinkerabout 3 hours ago
It's not "officially" supported, but iFixit has a guide for swapping the drive on a time capsule. I used mine with a 4TB drive for years with no trouble.
sleepybrettabout 2 hours ago
Sure, but still just a single drive.

My old trusty readynas should still work i think.. probalby. Supports smd for time machine and smb3 generally. If it doesn't I might finally be pushed onto a nas that isn't discontinued.

JumpCrisscrossabout 3 hours ago
"...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...

bayindirhabout 3 hours ago
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.

trillicabout 3 hours ago
I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk

JumpCrisscrossabout 3 hours ago
> That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware

Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.

bayindirhabout 3 hours ago
I believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
post-itabout 1 hour ago
Why is it that Apple products attract blogspam titles?

> 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”,

pvtmert28 minutes ago
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?

js28 minutes ago
Editorializing titles is against HN submission rules.

No one but Apple knows yet whether AFP will be dropped in macOS 27. The article links to no sources on AFP being dropped in macOS 27 and presents no new information. All we know for sure is that Apple stated with the release of macOS Sequoia 15.5 that "Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) client is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of macOS."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/121011

That's it. It could be gone in macOS 27, but maybe Apple will wait till macOS 28. They haven't said definitively yet.

ameliusabout 2 hours ago
Can't they hire an extra dev per abandoned project to not abandon it?
shantaraabout 3 hours ago
>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.

traderj0eabout 2 hours ago
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.
p_ingabout 2 hours ago
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.

yobertabout 3 hours ago
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!
realityfactchexabout 2 hours ago
> 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
But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.
kstrauserabout 3 hours ago
I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
Melatonicabout 2 hours ago
In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested).

How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?

j16sdizabout 2 hours ago
I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
p_ingabout 2 hours ago
That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
WorldPeasabout 2 hours ago
...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
mushufasaabout 2 hours ago
Wouldn't the TimeCapsules still work over wired connections, just like any other hard drive, even if the networking AFP protocol support is dropped?
TimTheTinkerabout 3 hours ago
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.

Melatonicabout 2 hours ago
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

apparaturabout 3 hours ago
Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
GeekyBearabout 3 hours ago
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.

apparaturabout 2 hours ago
Hence "next". And by local I meant directly connected drives.
Aurornisabout 3 hours ago
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

bananamogulabout 2 hours ago
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.
angottabout 3 hours ago
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.
apparaturabout 2 hours ago
"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.
plorkyeranabout 2 hours ago
I am fairly confident in saying that approximately zero enterprise customers used Xcode server. It was extremely limited and targeted at small shops which didn't see the need for a proper CI setup but had an extra machine sitting around to run builds on.
bayindirhabout 3 hours ago
As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.
AlexandrBabout 3 hours ago
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.
FireBeyondabout 3 hours ago
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.

And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.

So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.

AlexandrBabout 2 hours ago
Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
apparaturabout 2 hours ago
For me it was a key DB file inside the Photo library which Time Machine omitted from all backups and prevented me from restoring the library. Not fun.
walrus01about 3 hours ago
> 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.

semiquaverabout 3 hours ago
This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.
gjvcabout 2 hours ago
[delayed]
shaguoerabout 2 hours ago
Thanks for sharing this. Very insightful.
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StillBoredabout 3 hours ago
Does the mac still lack a SMB/CIFS browser?

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.

zdwabout 2 hours ago
macOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.
hamdingersabout 2 hours ago
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).
slackfanabout 2 hours ago
It's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.