Given the mtbf of disks, I wouldn’t risk doing backups on a device discontinued in 2018.

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.

"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.

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.

As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.

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.

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.

They discontinued sales in 2018, but continued to support Time Capsule backup over AFP through macOS 26 (Tahoe).

Time Machine support is also dropping support over SMB1 so whatever new solution needs to support SMB2/3.

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

I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.

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!

> 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.

It's had it since before version 10.4, though it wasn't fantastic, I'll give you that.

macOS has a Network location in the sidebar that will show other SMB devices discovered on the network.

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).