5th generation time capsule backups from big sur recovered from windows PC

You cannot use windows. Sorry.. Apple made Time Machine exclusively Mac.

And Big Sur makes this even worse. It will create a backup sparse bundle using APFS which is exclusively Mac OS format.

If you have a friend with a MacBook running Big Sur it should be possible to recreate the iMac drive to a USB disk plugged into it. Or take the iMac to Apple and get them to deal with it. If you have AppleCare they should handle it for you.

You can make a backup of the Time Capsule disk.. you will need a Mac formatted hard disk of equal or greater capacity to the TC. Plug it in and run the archive which you can do from the PC version 5.6.1 airport utility. This is Mac version but will look similar to PC. Go to the disk tab and select Archive.

Archive will create an exact copy of the whole TC disk. It will take a while, 1day or more if the disk in the TC is full. You can then give this disk to the repairer or Apple rather than the TC.

In the future you should buy a NAS. Copy files to the NAS and make sure you can open them from windows. Makes it a lot much more easier to access your files across different Machines.

I brought the time capsule to a friends house who was able to connect and retrieve the backup from the time capsule. From there we recovered the specific files from the time capsule.

Excellent.. that is about the only way to accomplish this.

It would have been easier if I had a 4th gen Time Capsule that had an external drive, as I would have just been able to use that.

A Gen5 is identical functionality to a Gen4.. In fact the Gen6 Airport Extreme is also used by lots of people since it can use External drive as well.

BTW. Apple did not support directly earlier model Extremes with air disk but lots of people found it worked. Just not very reliable for Time Machine.. but just as a place to store files it would work.

You will still have issues with windows opening files on the drive as explained below. Not ideal.

if I want specfic files to be accessible from windows machines, a manual (or shceduled) copy to the time machine as a NAS folder is required.

Yes.. You can do this from a Time Capsule but it is really not the ideal device. Any NAS today will handle backups a lot better over different platforms than the TC which is designed for Mac well before the current series of computers or Mac OS.

It can only work with two protocols, AFP, works fine but is Mac exclusive and now Apple is moving past it.

And SMB1 which is now turned off in windows due to security issues. You can reload SMB1 and accept the risk but any current NAS will support SMB3 which is now the common protocol on both Mac and PC.

You can make the Mac copy directly to the PC though.. it takes a bit of careful work getting everything right but it does work. Lots of tutorials around the place to do it so I won't try and replicate them. Just be patient and keep trying if it does not work after n tries.. n+1= possible success.. beat it into submission.

You can use a software like Carbon Copy Cloner which I use and highly recommend to copy just your user folders over to whatever common use device you have. That is easy to automate and set it to store various file versions so you can retrieve older copies.

Cloud is also another way to share common files across different computers.. I tend to avoid it as that takes your files and puts them where you no longer have direct control.. but is great way to keep important files against major calamity.. fire, floods etc.