THANK YOU

[phillipremaker]

I had two Time Capsules sadly in a drawer since the demise of SMB1. I am delighted to find this project.

My A1302 set up without an issue. I'm working on the A1355 now (which is the fussier Marvell platform)

These will become perfect simple low-performance backup servers for my kids instead of buying a new NAS.

Thanks for bringing these solid machines a new life.

Apropos of nothing, here was some earlier experiences I had with drive upgrade. I currently have a WD30EZRX in the A1355: https://lab.remaker.com/2019/06/upgrading-apple-airport-time-capsule.html

Strangely, one WD30EZRX with the exact same model number causes the TC to quickly power off. I wonder if this is the old head parking issue?

Anyway, this has been great fun. Very clever and solid design you did here.

[rcmynj6pjn-jpg]

When I heard that Apple would discontinue time capsule support I was heartbroken.
my trusty A1409 time capsule holds all of my and my partners backups of the last ten years and I just did not want to throw the trusty thing in the bin.
I first stumbled upon this repo when researching how to get smb support patched to the tc. Unfortunately in that point in time only the newer models with bsd 6 were supported. I tryed to understand how to patch the older bad 4 version, but due to a lack of knowledge, time and bsd proficiency I did not get it done.
today I was reminded of your project and was happy to see, that even the old tcs are supported now.
Thank you for your awesome work James!

If you have a patreon or something I would love to buy you a coffee or tee ❤️

[jamesyc]

I just created a buymeacoffee page, if you'd like to donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/jamesyc

Thanks for your support!

[jamesyc]

@phillipremaker the hack that I am doing involves adding a script at /mnt/Flash/rc.local which runs at boot. The script does a lot of stuff (like restarting smbd if it crashes, etc), but importantly it will wait ~30 seconds to let the device start up, before it loads anything.

If your device is restarting very quickly after starting boot, then it's probably not the stuff I added; and yeah, it's probably a hard drive error.

[phillipremaker]

FYI: I will share this experience which is not related to your code, but useful to see anyway.

I have 2 WD30EZRX "Green" drives. Both are WD30EXRX-00D8PB0

In the A1355:

The one manufactured in 2012 instantly crashes the TC on boot (Green to off, or Green to Yellow to off). It's a hardware level failure.

The one manufactured in 2013 works fine (!!!)

On inspection, the drives have different SATA boards. My hypothesis is that the older one has some kind of power draw pattern that causes the puny power supply to shut down. Or maybe the 10+ year old power supply is starting to have soft failures.

So this is not at all your issue, but I thought it would be a useful observation to share here. The Time Capsule was never really designed to have different drives installed the way a more generic NAS would be.

I'm seriously happy to have my old TCs powered up again and being useful. Thanks again.

[jamesyc]

The power supply is known to have failures for old time capsules, so that's not surprising to me.

[UKenGB]

The power supply is known to have failures for old time capsules, so that's not surprising to me.

I have a Gen 1 that worked perfectly for years but a while ago I noticed was dead. Connect power, but simply does not start.

I suspected the power supply, but is there a simple fix? Is it perhaps some capacitors that have 'blown' (as is usually the cause of PSU failure) and can be replaced? Anyone done this?

What are the differences between Gen 1 - 4 TCs. Does a Gen 1 have other limitations that really make it not worth fixing?

Great work from @jamesyc to provide this. I am so pleased to have my other (working) TCs now usable with forthcoming MacOS versions.

[phillipremaker]

I pulled out the power supply in a Gen3 which was shutting down on the regular, and could find no simple failure. The power supply has densely packed components and is glued together in lot of parts, and wrapped in brittle plastic that fell apart as I disassembled it. It's a slightly weird 12V/5V 35W power supply, with no ready substitute.

I ultimately got a 12V to 5V DC-DC converter for automotive applications that provided 5V/5A (specifically Amazon B0FYNCSV2Z) and used a 12V/2.5A wall wart power supply in conjunction with that. I tied the grounds at both ends together, and soldered to the 12V, 5V and GND lines unsoldered from the original supply.

NOTE: The original power supply zapped me a few times when handling it after unplugged. The design (or failure mode) doesn't drain the capacitors after power off. Behave accordingly.

Careful though: while doing this I carelessly reversed the 5V power polarity to the Time Capsule and blew the TVS (transient voltage suppression) diode on an old 3TB drive. A simple fix, but I don[t have good surface-mount soldering skills and destroyed the PCB attempting a repair. I ended up scrapping the drive. The Time Capsule itself survived.

As a side note, this was probably too much work for an item you can get for $30-$40 used on Marketplace or eBay. I would avod the 3rd Gen (A1355) since ny experience is that it is probably the worst of the Time Capsules. I suspect that either the marginal power supply design or the decay of my particular one may have been the root cause for all my drive compatibility issues first seen in 2019.

[UKenGB]

Good info @phillipremaker.

I have a Gen 3 that has run faultlessly for years and I can find no information on any improvements made for the 4th Gen, just that the HD capacity was increased, so I had thought them basically the same.

However, perhaps Apple did actually make some improvements to the PSU for the Gen 4, but 'omitted' to mention that.

I'm writing off my failed Gen 1 as there were many improvements after that which make its repair not worthwhile.

If looking for another TC though, 3rd or 4th Gen?

[phillipremaker]

I can't speak to the 4th Gen, but the 3rd gen (A1355) gave me hours upon hours of grief (including the misadventure documented above), so I would strongly recommend tossing all 3rd Gens into an active volcano. Your mileage may vary.

[phillipremaker]

@rcmynj6pjn-jpg Please please please make sure you have a 2nd or 3rd backup of what's in your TC. Drives will eventually fail; it's what they do. At least an external drive backup of the TC on a periodic basis or a second TC to mirror it or a service like Backblaze to store a copy in the cloud.

3-2-1: 3 copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of media, with at least one offsite or in the cloud.

Backups themselves should be periodically archived to cold media.

[jamesyc]

Yep. I pay for a backblaze subscription as well for my own data. The TC is just great as a super convenient backup option, that's a lot faster (as it's on LAN and not over the internet).

[rcmynj6pjn-jpg]

@phillipremaker thank you for your advice. At the moment i have the time capsule and an icloud backup of everything important. I plan on setting up a home server, that would make the backup actually redundant.

@jamesyc: I have a weird issue: the smb patch worked flawlessly, but during the first backup from my machine (macbook pro 14" m1 pro, Tahoe 26.5.0/.1) the update from macos 26.5.0 to 26.5.1 run and interrupted the backup. Since then (yesterday) time machine is rejecting my encrypted backup password. I am able to inspect my backups via finder/ time machine with the same password. My partners macbook pro 13" Tahoe 26.3.1 has no problems with the same passwords.
Did you ever come across such a problem? I already deleted all keychain passwords/ entries related to my time capsule to prevent it from interfering due duplicates, tried to remount the time capsule and set time machine destination to it via terminal. Which did not help unfortunately.
I guess it is a problem with my machine, but am unable to pinpoint it, yet.

[jamesyc]

@rcmynj6pjn-jpg sorry, I haven't seen that before.

[Mark-E-AUS]

Echoing the thanks here. My old v5 is a second local backup and I didn't really want to go and set up another machine with a raspberry pi or similar. I put an 8TB drive in it not that long ago so this is really handy. I have changed my network to lock the IP address and filter it from internet access though. ;)

[defulmere]

This totally rescued my soon-to-be-obsolete 3TB time capsule, thank you!

[philippecl]

Works fine with my 5th generation Timecapsule. Installation was easy. Thanks !

[renatowozniak]

Congratulations! Very easy tool! You is the best!