Comment by JumpCrisscross
19 hours ago
"...if you have an Apple silicon Mac and AFP support is dropped from macOS 27, that would leave you unable to upgrade without replacing your network storage."
How big is this market? I'm not saying vibe code a product, but...
That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware.
I have colleagues who are running AFP on BSD for continuous backups on their systems, and they have to reconfigure something new to be able to continue backing up their systems.
I use this for networked Time Machine backups for multiple Macs in my household. Works just as well over tailscale VPN.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netatalk
One of my COVID projects was to set up a networked Time Machine backup on Raspberry Pi.
Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.
Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.
Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.
2 replies →
> That "replacement" is not always full-on hardware
Oh, I was thinking only of software. Apple dropping AFP in the OS doesn't mean it can't work at all.
I believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
Netatalk has been around for like 25 years: https://github.com/Netatalk/Netatalk
Relevant to the discussion is that the project comes with an AFP client as well. I have no experience with the client but I've used the Netatalk server for more than 15 years.
I've already built it: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.