AFP is being discontinued late next year? Would we still be able to access external drives with that format?

[DBZmusicboy01]

I am seeing that MacOS 26 will be the last version to support AFP. What I don’t understand is if I have files on an external hard drive that I want to view. Will it make it impossible? I am very confused.

 

[estabya]

AFP is a network transfer protocol, not to be confused with APFS, a file system for storage volumes.

 

[ultratiem]

You’ll have to move to Samba like the rest of the world. Apple has deprecated APF in Mavericks, which released in 2013. They warned people to move to SMB way back then. You would have had some 13 years to figure it out.

 

[Alwis]

You’ll have to move to Samba like the rest of the world. Apple has deprecated APF in Mavericks, which released in 2013. They warned people to move to SMB way back then. You would have had some 13 years to figure it out.

But the sad truth is, that AFP still works better or at least faster as Apples implementation of SMB, even after all these years. If I remember it correctly back in the days they used Samba or at least an open source implementation of SMB and everything was well. The problems started when Apple decided to do their own thing.

 

[AdamBuker]

This could be a problem for me as I have a number of mixed macs. I still have uses for my PowerPC macs alongside my more modern Apple Silicon macs. Now I'm probably going to have to shuttle everything between them on thumb drives or I might have to revive an Intel machine to serve as a bridge between them. At least I still have some time to figure this out.