Will Time machine backups, wireless and hard wired, be supported on 3rd party routers?

For household use and SOHO applications AirPorts and Time Machine work fine.

The annual .. I am going to scrub your backups because I shat myself in the bird's nest is now too common.

If it has not happened to you yet it will.

To people seeing and reading constantly in this area.. we see this question daily several times.. and much more commonly after Sierra.. and especially High Sierra with its new SSD format APFS backing up to network.

I have not found the verssions of CCC that I used in the past to be as automatic and "invisible" to users as Time Machine has been.

CCC Certainly not difficult to turn on.. yes.. it means you have to select source and target and how frequently but you need to do the first two on Time Machine. Once you do that it is automatic.. in the background process. Perhaps you stopped using CCC a while ago. It is fully automatic once configured.. it has excellent logging.. and unlike TM has never wiped out its own backup.

For continuous automated incremental backups where you can easily revert to earlier file version.. TM is exceptional. If only you could rely on it.

CCC can create a bootable clone. That means your computer can be boot from external drive (but not network.. Mac OS needs to catch up to windows in that area). The only true test of a backup is recovery and test boot.. that takes many many hours on TM and 2min on CCC.

Before Time Machine it was a constant battle to get them to keep up with their back ups.

This is true.. and I worked in computer support Horrifying how many people would ask me to do some major work on a computer vital to their business.. when I asked did they have current backups would look at me with blank stares. Because it had never broken down meant it never would in the future.. wannacry might have converted a few of them.

However Time Machine is generally now so poor to network targets.. you actually are in a worse situation than above.. people actually wipe their computers believing they have a backup and discover after the event backup is non-existent or badly broken or has no emails, photos or itunes library in it etc etc.

Even the mainstream have picked up all is not well in TM land.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3170844/macs/when-backups-go-bad-the-problem-wi th-using-network-drives-with-time-machin…

I swapped from TM to CCC for reliable backups.. but I do still run Time Machine as service to the community. I am currently running Asus RT-AC3200 (but any of the high end Asus support Time Machine).

It uses a USB3 port and is about the same speed for file transfer as the TC internal drive with a portable laptop drive.

The laptop drive is running Mac format.. HFS+ which is better than most routers that run a linux format for example ext2 or ext3 and Time Machine is on sparsebundle contained on the wrong format disk.

However it has not been as reliable as the TC so far. Not every firmware update of the Asus helps the reliability. And I mean this is even worse than the Time Capsule I was running.

Tesserax comment

Again, FWIW, I stopped using my Time Capsules for Time Machine. Instead, I use a pair of devices for this. One is WD My Book Pro locally attached to one of my Mac's Thunderbolt port; the other is a Synology DS916+ NAS which does support TM and represents my "network drive." This has been flawless over the last few years in operation.

I am doing something similar.

I do still use the Time Capsule for CCC. It is reliable and works great as long as I don't use Time Machine.

I have a synology NAS.. that is excellent but a much more expensive proposition.

Plugged into the network you can backup all your computers whether wireless or wired or even remote. It is a proper file server of course and much faster than the TC.. and uses SMB2 or SMB3 protocol for backup. (Apple still rely on AFP for the TC). But Apple have already made SMB default network protocol since Mavericks. Eventually they will drop AFP.

I also run TM to a USB drive plugged directly to the computer. This is fastest and most reliable method. Absolutely best and cheapest method for any desktop Mac.. however for laptops you do want network backup over wireless.

Now with the Asus.. I am slowly learning the faults.. it seems to fall over about every 2 months. Each time it fails I change some minor configuration and start over.. so it will take me a while to make a solid recommendation. This is going to be the cheapest method for network backups.

Let me add Time Machine cannot yet use iCloud as a target. I think eventually it will. Certainly your programs like photos can already use cloud and for most Mac Apps that you share between Mac and iDevices.. cloud becomes the way to handle those files.

The issue is recovery of the system.. as yet that is too hard from cloud target.

Ok, let me see if I can answer your questions.

As you know, Time Machine requires a destination for backups. This can be a locally attached drive or a network drive. The connection to the network drive can either be over wireless or over Ethernet. Apple claims to support only the former.

It appears that you are interested in using a network "drive" for Time Machine, so I won't bore you with local backup options.

The following are all of the (known to me) network backup destinations that Time Machine can use (over wireless or wired connections):

• To an external drive directly attached (by USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt) to another Mac (running OS X Leopard+ with Personal File Sharing enabled).

  How to Set Up Your Mac to Act as a Networked Time Machine Drive - How-To Geek

• To an internal drive of a Mac Server.
• To an external drive directly attached (by USB, Firewire, or Thunderbolt) to a Mac Server.
• To a dedicated NAS device, which supports Time Machine.
• To an Xsan storage device.
• To a Time Capsule's internal drive.
• To an external drive directly attached by USB to a Time Capsule.
• To an external drive directly attached by USB to an 802.11ac AirPort Extreme.
• Raspberry Pi

  How to Use a Raspberry Pi as a Networked Time Machine Drive For Your Mac - How-to Geek

• Some other third-party routers, provided by Asus and Netgear.

To be clear it was the announcement of Apple discontinueing their AirPort/ Time Capsule routers that has prompted these questions.

As far as I know, Apple has not made any official announcements that they will be discontinuing their AirPort line of routers. If you can please provide me a link, I would appreciate it.

I presently have 4 computers using Time Machine on local network with 2 of the newer a/c Time Capsues ( 1 went in for service it was mission critical so bought replacement then gor the other one back from Apple)

If your operation is mission critical, I am a bit stumped on why you would choose consumer-grade networking hardware in the first place, since there are a number of alternatives to using Time Machine that don't rely on this type of equipment and still support Apple clients. I'm not challenging your decision, just curious.

I am looking towards the future and whether I should advise people to grab and hoard Time Capsulees while they are still available.

Since Apple has not updated their networking hardware offerings in over five years, I would only offer that recommending them, at this point, is "iffy" at best. FWIW. As my AirPorts start to fail, I have been replacing them with business-grade devices. So far, that hasn't been often, but they will as I have found (in my experience) that most consumer-grade hardware last 3-5 years.

my options at this time moving forward are

• To a dedicated NAS device, which supports Time Machine.
• To an Xsan storage device.

Again, FWIW, I stopped using my Time Capsules for Time Machine. Instead, I use a pair of devices for this. One is WD My Book Pro locally attached to one of my Mac's Thunderbolt port; the other is a Synology DS916+ NAS which does support TM and represents my "network drive." This has been flawless over the last few years in operation.

I also do not rely on Time Machine itself. As a secondary backup method, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for incremental and whole-clone backups. You may want to consider something like this as well.

Apple support's phone support on this issue was misleading in the sense they said all I would need is common 3rd party router and a standard off the shelf external Hard drive.

I would certainly agree with you there as most 3rd-party routers do not support attaching (& sharing) external hard drives. Again, I am only aware that some Asus & Netgear models do ... but I have no experience with them for Time Machine backups.

To me your answers support my point that the answer I got from phone support was inaccurate and continueing to use Time Machine in the future will become increasingly problematic.

No disagreement there. We already know that Time Machine has been problematic since macOS Sierra's release with network drives (specifically with the Time Capsule) as we see numerous posts here with corrupted backups doing so.

There are some potential Asus and Netgear routers that supposedly offer Time Machine support. Whether or not they would perform as Time Machine servers or backup destination shares I'm not sure of.

There are numerous other options for what to use for Time Machine backup destinations, both locally attached and network drives.

No official statement from Apple that I can find.

Have you seen one?

If the Time Capsule is going away, and you have been happy with the product, why not consider buying a few "closeouts" at sharply reduced pricing? The product should be good for 4-5 years, with luck.