Simple question: is the Apple File Share protocol still available in Big Sur? I have a laptop that is currently running Mojave (10.14.6), but is eligible to upgrade to Big Sur. I currently connect this laptop frequently to a High Sierra machine with external disks, and have found smb shares to be less reliable than afp.
I don’t think so. According to Wikipedia, AFP was deprecated in 10.9 (Mavericks) and removed in 11 (Big Sur).
I suppose it might be possible for third-party software to provide the support, but I don’t know of any such packages.
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I was using my Big Sur machine to connect to a Synology drive using AFP for a while. It works.
I switched to SMB, and think that the transfer is faster. And I think searching the network drive in the Finder works using SMB, while it didn’t (or was very slow and I didn’t wait) using AFP.
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Big Sur no longer supports sharing volumes via AFP, but it can still access AFP shares from other machines. So if your High Sierra machine has AFP shares on the network, your Big Sur machine can still access them. I’m not sure if Monterrey will change that situation though…
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For me, searching is fine in AFP, but whenever copying large files, the disk would unmount. It has been a while since I’ve tried using SMB, perhaps it has improved.
That’s what I expect to happen, but since I’m now getting around to upgrading to Big Sur, maybe I’ll upgrade my High Sierra Mac by the time I upgrade to Monterey. 