Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
throw0101c | on: Networking changes coming in macOS 27
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.

procaryote | parent | next
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 | parent | next
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.

loading story #47931369
TimTheTinker | parent | next
They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
GeekyBear | root | parent
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.
loading story #47927935
wazoox | root | parent
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.
ninkendo | root | parent | next
macOS 26 still has a hard kernel panic if you try to mount an NFS share with krb5 auth but don’t have a valid Kerberos ticket. 100% reproducible.

Every OS update I try mounting with no ticket, get a panic, fill in the error reporting dialog with a nice “hope you had a nice holiday break!” message or whatever is seasonally appropriate, with the same simple steps to reproduce. It’s just kinda comical at this point.

My guess is kerberized NFS has absolutely zero users within Apple, and it’s likely hard to find an engineer there who even knows what Kerberos is anymore.

I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.

donavanm | root | parent | next
Hah. I actually had opendirectory, OSX clients, and CentOS/RedHat clients running krb5 NFS off of netapp filers circa … 2008? Lots and lots of NFS in the (mansfield) hardware org at that time. I think krb on osx started getting hard around 2010 when they moved tickets and other credentials to a process aware in memory store. Became difficult to use TGT or machine identity for automation.

And yes, Im sure theres a very lonely radar bug for this. But even MM of revenue wont fix “edge cases” like this.

loading story #47931698
loading story #47929732
loading story #47928227
bborud | parent | next
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 | parent
Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.
loading story #47923708
loading story #47923696
loading story #47927950
loading story #47924128