…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.
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].
* 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.
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
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.
> 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”,
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.
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.
- Very slow, even on an M4.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
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
Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.
Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.
AFP and Time Capsules add attack vectors to the OS, which can be targeted even when few users actively using them. One dev could keep both basically functional, but to what end? User counts are already small, and people that aren't using them are still exposed by their mere existence.
Shrinking or removing code, in my experience, is one of the biggest single wins you can have in software development. Less to test, less to update, less to secure.
You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.
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.
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
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
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.
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.
How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?
cf Linux removing old network drivers this week for the same reason (without the hand-wringing that this Apple announcement is getting!)
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.
If you know it's unrelated, why try to derail this discussion? Why not start another? What's the point?
Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs, instead of being judged on its own merits?
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?
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.
Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.
Time really does fly.
philosophically I would beg to differ about any premise assuming we can trust the castle and moat model. Even on home networks.
Enshittification. When you're an ecosystem monopoly, people are forced to buy your shit no matter how bad it gets.
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.
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
Development is a finite resource, the argument here is to allocate them to hard-to-secure, outmoded, replaced, technology instead of anything future relevant. It doesn't make sense.
- BigCo already is a zero-sum deal, they use Xcode-cloud as a service, which runs back on their servers anyway... (Google, Amazon, Azure, etc)
- It was not a long-standing product. Introduced somewhere around 2016~ish if I remember correctly. Only lasted a few major releases. Easier to kill than an established one (ie. TimeMachine)
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.
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
* https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.8.0.html ("vfs_fruit")
* https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.
As for IronWolf Pro drives, I chose them because they seem to have similar longevity to enterprise drives with less noise (my equipment is in a closet under the stairs).
I don't recall when I stopped running netatalk on my NAS and switched to pure Samba, but I think it was before 2018.
IIRC, that could exist for MacOS in the form of Darwin.
These arguments fall apart when you remember that Apple has several trillion dollars at hand. It's not some shoestring startup.
Because I noticed my old Core 2 Quad PC with Nvidia 8600GT that my parents use as their email and Facebook machine, doesn't boot with any linux newer than Kernel 6.1 even though I can get Windows 11 to boot on it.
So the myth around "Linux is great for old PCs", highly depends on what HW you have.
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.
Apple seldom gives advanced notice of significant changes coming in the next major version of macOS, before its first beta-release at WWDC. One significant exception to this are changes to networking that could impact enterprise users. 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.
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. It repeated those warnings with macOS Sequoia 15.5, but still hasn’t confirmed when AFP will be lost.
Those who are most likely to be affected by this are still using Time Capsules, or elderly NAS systems that don’t support SMB3. As removal of AFP support won’t be retrospective, provided that none of your Macs will be upgraded to macOS 27, you’ll still be able to use AFP for your file shares and Time Machine backups. But 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.
Most recently, Apple has warned that a future version of macOS, and its device OSes, will require connections to certain servers to be made using at least TLS 1.2, with additional requirements. I’m grateful to Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder blog for drawing attention to this.
Although Apple carefully avoids being too specific, it warns that this change could come “as early as the next major software release”, although one of the purposes behind its support article is to gauge the impact the change might have on its enterprise customers. If there would be major problems, it may decide to delay its introduction.
This change is more technical, and largely applies to servers involved in supporting MDM, DDM, Automated Device Enrolment, app distribution and installation, and Apple software updates. Fortunately, if you run a local Content Caching server, that won’t be affected.
Unlike the removal of AFP, it’s far harder to tell whether a connection to a server complies with the new rules, which require:
The most reliable way to check is to audit connections made to each server, by screening log entries from the Mac or device. That’s further complicated by the fact that the log doesn’t normally gather the information that’s required. So the first step is to install a network diagnostics logging profile available from Apple. The support article explains how to collect a logarchive using sysdiagnose, and provides a monster predicate to extract relevant entries:"p=appstoreagent|appstored|managedappdistributionagent|managedappdistributiond|ManagedClient|ManagedClientAgent| mdmclient|mdmd|mdmuserd|MuseBuddyApp|NanoSettings|Preferences|profiled|profiles|RemoteManagementAgent| remotemanagementd|Setup|'Setup Assistant'|'System Settings'|teslad|TVSettings|TVSetup|XPCAcmeService AND s=com.apple.network AND m:'ATS Violation'|'ATS FCPv2.1 violation'"
And yes, Apple is encouraging system administrators to copy and paste a command into Terminal, because there’s no GUI app in macOS that could be used to do that, although you can use it in Ulbow, and I suspect in LogUI with a little modification.
If you’re within the scope of this proposed change, you’ll need to read Rich Trouton’s account, and Apple’s full article. I wish you the best of luck. As with AFP, this change shouldn’t apply retrospectively.
Bus mouse support isn't removed because it's old but because it's been broken since 2015 and nobody noticed.
Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.
Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.
I have no doubt the bean counters have drawn up every kind of spreadsheet they can imagine trying to quantify it as being not worth it, but I don't think these kinds of quality of life things can be easily quantified, because each small thing maintained might only impact a small number of users but collectively, all of these kinds of small things add up to either a system with sharp corners that constantly papercuts the user (current Apple software), or one that is so seamless that it engenders customer loyalty for decades (old Apple software). This kind of shortsighted penny-pinching is how companies become a shell of their former selves, suffering a slow death-by-MBA.
I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.
I actually wouldn't expect macOS to support actual floppy drives since the OS's list of supported devices doesn't include any that shipped with floppy drives. The fact that I cannot install the latest macOS on any devices older than 2019 is a related, but separate problem.
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.
Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.
It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.