I have an old AirPort Time Capsule, and while its usefulness as a Wi-Fi hotspot is outdated, it still works perfectly well for Time Machine backups on my secondary Mac at home. But then Apple announced that macOS 27 Golden Gate won’t include support for AirPort Disk or other Time Capsule disks, and suddenly the AirPort’s usefulness will soon expire, even though it continues to work without a hitch.
But James Chang has come to the rescue with a project that gives “all Time Capsules” new life. His TimeCapsuleSMB project is a “modern Samba setup” for the AirPort Time Capsule that essentially lets the device run as a Samba 4.24.3 server. This allows for Time Capsule to be seen by macOS 27 on networks via Bonjour. You can then use the Time Capsule on the network for Time Machine backups.
TimeCapsuleSMB is free and offers in-depth documentation on how to install it and troubleshooting on its GitHub repository. It does have some quirks. For example, if you have a 4th-generation AirPort or older, you must manually activate the Samba installation any time the device reboots. On 5th-generation and later devices, Samba restarts automatically. But for the most part, it should do the trick if you’ve been fretting about needing a new backup drive this fall.
Apple discontinued the AirPort in 2018, 10 years after it introduced the first Time Capsule and 20 years after the very first AirPort Base Station, which arrived in 1999. The devices use Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), a network file-sharing protocol that Apple stopped supporting in macOS 15.5, and Server Message Block (SMB) version 1. TimeCapsuleSMB uses a fork of Samba 4 that is modified to work with Time Capsules.
