Time Machine Can't Use Time Capsule Anymore: Next Steps

October 2, 2026

Illustration of an old, dimmed Time Capsule-style base station beside a glowing modern external SSD, with a soft stream of light flowing from the Mac to the SSD.

If your Time Machine backups to an AirPort Time Capsule stopped after upgrading, this is why: Time Capsule on macOS 27 no longer works as a backup destination. Apple’s support page on backing up to network storage says the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) isn’t supported in macOS 27 or later, and that covers AirPort Time Capsule. Time Machine now uses SMB for network backups, and as MacRumors reports, Time Capsule hardware doesn’t support SMB for this.

Nothing is wrong with your Mac, and the fix is to choose a new backup destination. Here’s the order I’d do it in.

Before you upgrade: copy what you need from old backups

If you haven’t upgraded yet, this is the safest moment to act. macOS 27 can no longer connect to the Time Capsule over AFP, so you can’t reach your old backups the usual way from that Mac.

Open Time Machine on your current macOS and restore anything you can’t afford to lose (documents, photos, project folders) to another drive.
Don’t erase or reformat the Time Capsule. Keep it as a read-only archive.
If you have a second Mac still on macOS Tahoe, including an Intel Mac, it can keep reading the old backups.

Apple warned about this in macOS Tahoe, and AFP was already deprecated in macOS Sequoia 15.5, so you may have seen a warning when you set the Time Capsule up. See Derflounder’s write-up for the timeline.

Already upgraded? You can still follow the steps below. Just be aware that getting at the old history will most likely need a Mac on an older macOS.

Choose a new Time Machine destination

Two options are supported:

An external SSD or hard drive plugged directly into your Mac. This is the simplest and what I’d suggest for most people.
A NAS that supports Time Machine over SMB. Check the manufacturer’s documentation before you buy, and see how to mount a NAS drive on your Mac for the connection steps.

Apple recommends backup storage at least twice the capacity of your Mac. Modern Time Machine backups use APFS, so the drive may be formatted that way when you set it up.

Set up Time Machine on the new disk

Connect the drive (or make sure the NAS share is reachable).
Open System Settings > General > Time Machine.
Click Add Backup Disk (or the + button), choose the disk, then click Set Up Disk.

Apple’s guide to backing up your Mac with Time Machine covers the same steps, and my own walkthrough on how to set up Time Machine goes into more detail. If your old Time Capsule is still listed as a destination, remove it with the minus button. That only forgets the destination and doesn’t delete backups.

What about your old backup history?

Honestly, the safest answer is to start a fresh backup. Keep the Time Capsule (and a Mac on Tahoe, if you have one) as an archive until the new disk covers enough history for you.

There are advanced tmutil options, such as inheritbackup, which claims an existing backup for the current Mac and needs sudo and Full Disk Access. I haven’t verified moving a Time Capsule backup to a local drive this way on macOS 27, and it’s not a documented migration path, so I wouldn’t rely on it. Don’t use associatedisk for this either. It’s meant for rebinding history to a disk whose UUID changed.

Expect a big first backup

The first backup to a new destination is a full one, so it may take a long time and use a lot of space. Leave your Mac plugged in and let it run. Time Machine’s later backups are typically much quicker.

Removing duplicates beforehand can make that first backup smaller. If you have copies of the same photos or downloads scattered around, my guide on finding and removing duplicate files on external drives shows how to tidy them first. And once the new disk fills up in a year or two, how to delete old Time Machine backups will be useful.

What about TimeCapsuleSMB?

There’s a community project called TimeCapsuleSMB that installs a modern version of Samba on a Time Capsule. Macworld covered it. It’s unofficial and not supported by Apple, and on 4th generation and earlier models, Samba needs to be re-enabled after each reboot. I’d treat it as a hobby project, and I wouldn’t make it your only backup.

Intel Macs

Intel Macs aren’t affected. macOS Tahoe is the last version for Intel, and macOS 27 requires Apple silicon, so those Macs can’t upgrade and keep their current Time Capsule setup for now. Even so, I’d plan a replacement before the hardware gives out.