Apple has ended AFP support in macOS 27, effectively shutting down Time Capsule Time Machine backups. For owners willing to tinker, a GitHub project called TimeCapsuleSMB aims to retrofit modern SMB support so the hardware can still serve as a backup target.
The morning a macOS update lands is usually a quiet moment. This one lands with a thud for a specific kind of Apple household: the Time Capsule.
Starting with macOS 27, support for AFP is terminated. That is the protocol Time Capsule relies on for its network connectivity. Time Capsule has been discontinued for years, but support lasted up to macOS 26—giving owners a lingering sense that the device would keep doing its job.
That hope didn’t survive the transition. In macOS Sequoia 15. Apple had already warned that AFP support was being deprecated and would be removed in a future release. What owners saw later was the countdown: a notice in macOS 26 warned about the end of support for AirPort Disk and other Time Capsule disks. macOS 27 is that endpoint.
For most people, it means Time Machine will change its expectations. From macOS 27 onward, Time Machine will require hardware using SMBv2 or SMBv3. Time Capsule, meanwhile, includes support for SMBv1—but that was only supported in macOS 26 as a deprecated measure. The practical result is sharp: Time Machine backups will work with modern NAS devices, but not with Time Capsules.
That’s the piece that hurts. The hardware still sits there, blinking patiently on a shelf or in a living room corner, a once-easy backup destination that now can’t speak the language macOS 27 wants.
Still, there are efforts aimed at keeping those boxes alive.
A GitHub project described in April. titled TimeCapsuleSMB. is built to update the Time Capsule’s outdated SMB layer with a newer one while leaving Apple’s firmware untouched. The goal is straightforward: keep Apple’s file sharing enabled so the internal disk. or connected USB drives. continue to auto-mount and work on the forthcoming macOS 27.
Under the hood, the approach is essentially a modern Samba build loaded onto the Time Capsule. The server uses Samba 4.24.3, advertises itself with Bonjour, and accepts authenticated SMB3 connections. If the project works as intended. you’d connect to the server using a normal SMB URL. then use it for Time Machine backups.
When it was first written about, there were worries that it might be more proof-of-concept than a complete solution. Those concerns haven’t completely disappeared, but the pace is hard to ignore: by the time of the later write-up, there had been many commits, including some made just hours old.
The catch is that this isn’t a casual fix.
The project’s requirements spell out a level of work that pushes it well beyond the typical user. You need a Mac running macOS 14 or later. or a Linux device on the same local network as the Time Capsule. You also need the password for the Time Capsule, plus Homebrew, Python 3.9 or later, and smbclient installed locally.
Installation is described as quite complex. Even so, near the top of the instructions is a “Quick Start” option that relies on just five commands—an attempt to shrink the barrier for people who are already motivated to save their existing backups.
For Time Machine users, that leaves the current landscape pretty bleak. One path is an external drive. Another is investing in a NAS. Those are the obvious, expensive answers.
TimeCapsuleSMB, if it delivers, is the alternative: not a replacement for Apple’s discontinued hardware, but a way to revive an underappreciated slice of the product line that many people already own.
macOS 27 AFP Time Capsule Time Machine SMBv2 SMBv3 SMBv1 AirPort Disk TimeCapsuleSMB Samba 4.24.3 GitHub Bonjour NAS cybersecurity