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by JumpCrisscross 59 days 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...
2 comments
bayindirh 59 days ago
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.

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trillic 59 days ago
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

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snapetom 59 days ago
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.

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wang_li 59 days ago
Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.
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jshier 59 days ago
Nah, classic Macintosh OSes aren't compatible with modern AFP.
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wang_li 59 days ago
They are compatible with netatalk though. The project split between version 2 and 3, but in recent releases they folded them back into a single thing. Current netatalk releases support all versions of AFP.
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JumpCrisscross 59 days ago
> 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.

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bayindirh 59 days ago
I believe the only supported mode is SAMBA now.
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daneel_w 59 days ago
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.

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jychang 59 days ago
I've already built it: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB

This runs Samba 4 on the Apple Time Capsule.

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