AFP Support Disappearing: Another Nail in the Time Capsule Coffin

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Originally published at: AFP Support Disappearing: Another Nail in the Time Capsule Coffin - TidBITS

When I covered the recent update to macOS 15.5 Sequoia (see “Apple Releases iOS 18.5, macOS 15.5, and Other x.5 OS Updates,” 12 May 2025), I referenced a detail from Apple’s enterprise release notes without providing any context:

Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) client is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of macOS.

While Apple hasn’t specified a timeline for AFP’s removal, macOS 16 seems likely.

Howard Oakley explains more about what this means in “Check your network backups and shares, as AFP is being removed,“ reminding us of what AFP is (an old Apple file-sharing protocol) and detailing the implications of its removal from macOS. Apple made SMB (Server Message Block, the industry-standard file-sharing protocol primarily associated with Windows) the default in OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

In practical terms, the most likely scenario where people will still be using AFP is with Apple’s Time Capsule backup appliances, which were discontinued in 2018 (see “RIP: Apple AirPort, 1999–2018,” 27 April 2018). Although the Time Capsule is no longer available for purchase, many users have kept them for years, prompting Ivan Drucker to write “Network Time Machine Backups: Moving on from the Time Capsule” (14 January 2022).

The takeaway from Ivan’s exhaustively researched article is that, although there are a handful of solutions, none is ideal. A few of the options rely on AFP, like the Time Capsule, while others are overly complicated or will be awkward during restoration, and a Mac running a Time Machine server is too expensive.

Some people have reacted by trading network Time Machine backups for a local backup drive connected to an inexpensive hub. When you plug the laptop in to charge, the drive becomes available, and Time Machine backs up to it. If you opt for this approach, remember that when a backup drive isn’t available, Time Machine creates local snapshots to the extent possible within available drive space, automatically deleting them after 24 hours. You can even recover data from those snapshots using the Time Machine interface. Then, when the backup drive becomes available, Time Machine copies those snapshots to it. As long as you can connect a laptop to its backup drive when it’s in its regular charging location, backups should be offloaded frequently enough.

If you’re still backing up to a Time Capsule, what’s your plan? If nothing else, the age of the device suggests that you should be evaluating alternatives before its drive succumbs to old age.

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How does that work if there are two or more targets for Time Machine? (In other words, if I have two or more drives that I have set up for Time Machine backups, do the local backups get copied to the first one that Time Machine sees? Or does Time Machine, realizing there are multiple drives, save the snapshots to copy to each target?)

I am still using a Time Capsule, for three things. I use it as a Time Machine target for multiple Macs, I have a printer connected to its ethernet so two Macs can print, and I use it as shared storage for some files that I want each Mac to be able to access. (The files are on an external disk attached to the Time Capsule’s USB port.)

Each Mac already has an SSD as a Time Machine target (and one Mac has a spinning disk as a target, also). The printer access could be through an ethernet switch that I have had for many years. But the shared files are a minor concern.

I’ve never set up or used file sharing on a Mac. If that is the simplest solution, then this might be the impetus that changes that situation.

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I’m using my old Time Capsule for daily CCC backups and it works well for that. It stopped working well for Time Machine backups quite a while ago - the computer would retain all those local backups. It also is acting as an ethernet hub with a printer connection.

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No idea, but I would guess that they’d be copied to the first backup drive it sees.

That could work—set one Mac as the default storage location. Or just put the shared files in iCloud Drive or Dropbox or the like, if there aren’t too many.

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The problem with Time Capsules despite their age (and the impending AFP deprecation) is that they’re so damn useful and they work even now 7 years(?) since the last one one was sold.

If you have one it’s definitely time to find a new solution but the simple solutions aren’t there. What’s with this technical progress thingie? Yes, repurpose an old Mac and use file sharing; yes, use an NAS but, er, there might be problems; yes, use the cloud but when you have 2TB of files and live in the middle of Montana on a slow DSL—um, really?

The problem for us all is that Time Capsules were a really elegant solution, easily managed, that handled a surprising number of use cases. There simply is no available alternative that matches their simplicity and sturdiness.

So much for progress.

Dave

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Linksys Velop wi-fi routers have a usb port for sharing a connected drive via SMB. Very similar, but not as elegant, to Time Capsule functionally.

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I keep my TimeCapsule plugged into my Bell modem/router as during larger file transfers over the LAN, the Bell will shut down and restart (and oh so slowly), whereas if I connect my Macs to the TC it handles large files with aplomb. I have, somewhere, three of the older flat TimeCapsules (pre-802.11n) and if this one ever fails, the first thing I’ll do will be to use one of those. The rate-limiting factor in internet speed is my (supposed) 50Mbps Bell cellular connection, not the wi-fi networking protocol. I gave up using them for TimeMachine as the backups quickly become corrupted and fail.

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I agree. I have a second generation TC that had been powered on almost continuously since I bought it in 2009, but its power supply finally died about a month ago. I had disabled its wireless functions and used it via Ethernet as a print server for a USB-only printer and for very temporary storage of non-critical files.

For people who won’t be upgrading to macOS 16, I think a TC remains a reasonable backup solution, especially if the backup target is an external drive, but I’d be hesitant about using its internal drive or its wireless features, even if it is one of the final models.

Aside from general ease of use, I think the only real use case where AirPorts and Time Capsules are superior to most alternatives in 2025 is a rapidly diminishing one: as wired network print servers for USB-only printers.

It used to be pretty common for consumer routers to include print server functionality, but I’m not even sure if any current consumer routers still do, at least out of the box. AIs say that Netgear and TP-Link do, but I know that Netgear dropped support a couple of years ago, going so far as to remove it via a firmware upgrade from routers that previously supported it, and I can’t be bothered to look up the answer for TP-Link. AirPorts and TCs “just work” as USB print servers. Factoring in power consumption, a late model AirPort Express makes an excellent wired print server.

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  1. Many printers have built-in network connectivity. I can connect my Canon printer to my network either via Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable (the way I do it). In fact, the printer’s default setup is via a network connection.

  2. My ASUS WiFi router has a USB port that can be used for a printer or an external disk drive. If a disk drive is attached, one option is to use the connected drive as a TM drive.

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When I migrated from my Time Capsule a few years back, I found that my new Linksys router had an external USB port so I could connect an external drive. It uses the SMB protocol, but does not support APFS formatted disks, only HPFS. So if I try to use it as a Time Machine drive it fails, Sequoia does format any external hard drive for Time Machine as APFS only, not HPFS. That is why I ended up having an external hard drive connected directly to my MBP for Time Machine backups.

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When printers have built-in networking, that almost always is the best choice for connectivity. The use case I raised was for printers that do not have built-in networking (or that may be otherwise unsuitable for direct networking, e.g. printers that have known networking vulnerabilities).

Thanks for sharing that. That’s very useful information! I see that the Asus models that support print services do so through LPR/LPD, so Macs can use those services without installing third party client software. Back when Netgear still supported shared printers, it required installation of the Netgear “ReadyShare” print app. My next router may be an Asus model.

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Drat. I just checked my router, and it’s similar.

If you use a USB hard drive, make sure its file system is FAT32, exFat, NTFS or HFS+.

Thanks for the heads-up.

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I’m surprised that matters. I thought TM, when saving to network volumes, creates APFS-formatted sparse-bundle disk image files, which should work equivalently no matter how the remote volume is formatted.

If you can’t use that device as a TM destination, I would assume that’s because it is a generic SMB network volume (without whatever magic Apple specifies should be used for networked TM), not because of how the volume is formatted.

If you require network-based TM, then you’re going to need something that supports Apple’s proprietary extensions. Either a NAS that explicitly supports TM or an always-on Mac, where you can share a volume (like a USB-connected storage device) to your LAN as a TM destination.

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@Shamino is correct.

For networked Time Machine backups, recent versions of macOS create a virtual APFS filesystem within a “sparse bundle” file, though HFS+ may be used in a sparse bundle from an older source volume. The drive itself does not have to be formatted to either APFS or HFS+ for networked backups.

This is why you can run networked Time Machine backups to network attached storage (NAS) devices that use non-Apple drive formats, like exFAT, ZFS, or others.

The key thing is that the server/router supports whatever other Apple magic is required for Time Machine.

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I have various Macs using local, Time Capsule and Synology NAS for Time Machine. I guess they have a range of file systems depending on how long ago they were set up.

My only issue with the NAS is that I have to manually mount it for Time Machine to work (but that may be my lack of technical skills).

From the previous two comments above it seems that the discontinuation of AFP will not affect those backups. The only requirement is that the server is compatible with Time Machine. Is this the concensus?

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It’s a little more complicated than that. It will be useful to keep in mind several items:

  • APFS is Apple’s native format for modern filesystems.
  • AFP is the Apple Filing Protocol, which is a networking protocol. Apple will drop support for AFP in an undisclosed future version of macOS.
  • SMB is an independent networking protocol that Apple has been encouraging people to use instead of AFP.

Next:

  • Time Machine can be run over a network using AFP.
  • Time Machine can be run over a network using a specific version of SMB (version 3) if the network backup device supports certain additional requirements and SMB extensions.

When Apple drops support for AFP in a future version of macOS (let’s call it macOSfuture), any Mac running macOSfuture will be unable to use Time Machine over AFP. Macs running older versions of macOS will continue to be able to use Time Machine over AFP.

In your case:

  • Local backups should continue working, since neither AFP nor SMB are involved.
  • Any Mac you upgrade to macOSfuture will not be able to use your Time Capsule, since your Time Capsule uses AFP for Time Machine and is limited to SMB version 1. Macs running older versions of macOS will continue to work with your Time Capsule.
  • If your Synology device is still supported by Synology, it probably supports (or will support) SMB version 3 with the Time Machine extensions. It most likely will work with macOSfuture machines as well as current machines, but you’ll want to check with Synology and make sure you are running the latest version of Synology software/firmware to be sure.
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I’m a long-time TidBITS reader, from the late 90s or so. I started reading just before switching to use Debian Linux(!) but have kept reading since Adam’s commentary is always interesting, and most of my family use Macs. It’s my first time posting here, hence the prologue.

I tried to use a 2014 Mac Mini upgraded with an nvme drive to run as a family Time Machine server but suffered issues with either AFP or APFS (Apple File System) volumes causing corruption.

Wary of corruption and the fact that the 2014 Mac was mothballed at macOS 12 I installed Debian on it and reformatted the generous nvme drive as a btrfs volume. It was very easy to get this running samba (the open source SMB/CIFS file server) with Time Machine support.

The Time Machine backups have been running for over 4 months without a hitch. In addition to that, btrfs (apart from bitrot protection) gives snapshot support. Although it might seem incongrouus to take snapshots of an APFS volume which itself has Time Machine snapshots within it, it allows roll-back to an earlier version of a Time Machine volume if needed. (I’m wary of corruption re-occurring). And while the btrfs snapshots may not be sharing data between them as efficiently as APFS volumes themselves, these still perform pretty well. For example, these weekly snapshots, on a system with a lot of churn, show the following:

btrfs fi du -s *
     Total   Exclusive  Set shared  Filename
 ...
 351.41GiB   394.34MiB   350.97GiB  20250510-timemachine
 362.40GiB   241.36MiB   362.10GiB  20250517-timemachine
 372.74GiB   299.67MiB   372.37GiB  20250524-timemachine

The exclusive data shown for each snapshot is typically well under 400MB.

Enthused by this low-cost solution, I’m trying an even lower-cost approach for a “travelling server”. This is a Mele Quieter 4C box with a 2TB nvme disk, about the size of a large, boxy phone. This gadget has an Intel 4 core N100 CPU, 8GB RAM and 128GB eMMC onboard storage, is pretty robust and well-made, and are apparently often used in industrial settings. In the UK the total cost of the box and drive was about £250.

I make sure that there are always three copies of our data, so I don’t mind having just a single nvme drive in a backup device. The benefit is you can grab that nvme stick and put it into just about any reasonably modern Linux machine or USB stick reader and simply mount it.

Sorry for the long explanation, but since Adam asked for alternatives, I thought I’d mention this approach.

p.s. I don’t do this but it should be a snap to serve printer sharing from any Debian box using CUPS.

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However enabling Time Machine support in the Asus software (or the Merlin one) supports Time Machine only over AFP so when Apple stops supporting AFP entirely this solution will also stop working.

It is possible to use Time Machine over SMB with a disk attached to an Asus router, but currently this is not simple (and not entirely reliable in my experience). I asked about it and found some ways to do it at Time machine support when AFP is removed from macOS? | SNBForums

It works fine, however while reconnecting the SMB share is reliable, re-opening the sparse bundle is not. Not yet sure how to get that reliable so the whole thing can just work.

To clarify when I say not entirely reliable I mean specifically the automation with the re-opening of the sparse bundle. Otherwise everything else is reliable.

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My ASUS WiFi router has a USB port that can be used for a printer or an external disk drive. If a disk drive is attached, one option is to use the connected drive as a TM drive.

I tried to get that working oh-so-many times. I finally gave up. Reliability is an issue, and without knowing the backup is being made successfully or that it can be retrieved successfully (this a long-standing problem I’ve had with Time Machine), then Time Machine is of little value.

Now I have a Chronosync job that copies necessary files to a plain ol’ drive hooked up to that port my ASUS router. It works quickly and successfully. I’m still tweaking the Chronosync settings to make it run at intervals when my Mac is running but that’s not a high-priority project for me.

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Interesting to see that you are using Merlin on your Asus router.

As the SMB deprecation conversation has been developing, I have been wondering about the state of support for Time Machine over SMB on consumer routers using alternative firmware, e.g., OpenWRT.

Personally, my backup needs are already covered, but some technically inclined TidBITters might find the approach worth investigating.

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