Someone in the studio updates their Mac to macOS 27 over the weekend because Apple nudged them to. Monday morning, the shared project drive will not mount. No warning, no error worth reading, just a job that cannot be opened and a client who wants it by lunch.
That is the shape of the AFP problem, and it is arriving now. Apple Filing Protocol has been living on borrowed time for years. With macOS 27 (Golden Gate), the time is up. AFP is dead. SMB is what runs your shares from here on.
What actually changed
AFP was Apple's own file-sharing protocol, first introduced back in 1985. Apple stopped using it as the default years ago and started warning it would go entirely. The deprecation notice landed in macOS Sequoia 15.5 in May 2025, the command-line tools for mounting AFP were pulled in macOS Tahoe 26 and macOS 27 has now removed AFP client support completely.
In plain terms: a Mac running macOS 27 can no longer open an afp:// share at all. It is not slower or less supported. It simply cannot connect. Apple's answer, and it has been for a long time, is SMB3, the same protocol Windows and Linux and every modern NAS already speak.
The catch is that AFP does not announce itself. Most people connecting to a share have no idea which protocol is carrying their files. It has quietly worked for years, so nobody looked. That is exactly why this bites: the shares keep working right up until the Mac updates, and then they stop.
Where AFP is probably still hiding
If your kit predates about 2020, or was set up by someone who liked things the old Mac way, AFP is likely lurking in one of these places.
NAS shares
Synology, QNAP and similar boxes often had AFP switched on for years. If a Mac ever mounted a volume with afp:// in the address, that service is still running and needs turning off in favour of SMB.
Acronis Files Connect
Formerly ExtremeZ-IP. Studios used it to serve AFP shares from Windows file servers to Macs. It is the classic AFP culprit, and it is now end of life in its own right.
Time Capsule backups
Time Machine backups to an old Apple Time Capsule run over AFP. Those backups stop on macOS 27. The hardware is long discontinued, so this is a moment to move backups somewhere current.
Old muscle memory
Saved afp:// favourites in the Finder sidebar, login items that auto-mount volumes and scripts that reference AFP paths. These fail silently and confuse everyone the morning after an update.
The Acronis problem on top
If you are running Acronis to serve Mac shares, you have two clocks running down at once, not one.
Both Acronis file products are already end of life. Acronis Files Connect (the tool that serves AFP shares, once called ExtremeZ-IP) and Acronis Cyber Files (formerly Acronis Access) both reached end of life on 31 December 2025, with extended support ending 31 December 2026.
So the protocol has gone from macOS and the product many studios used to serve it is going too. Moving your shares onto native SMB solves both in one job rather than kicking the Acronis decision down the road.
The filename trap
AFP was relaxed about what you could call a file. SMB is not, and neither is Windows, cloud storage or cloud backup. Colons, slashes, question marks, asterisks, quote marks, angle brackets, pipe symbols and trailing spaces or full stops are all perfectly legal on an old Mac share and all illegal the moment those files land on SMB.
Creative teams produce them without thinking. A date written 03/07/26 in a filename. A version tagged "Final: v2". A client folder with a slash in the name. On AFP they worked. Move the share and those files either refuse to copy or arrive damaged, and you will not always be told which ones.
That is why an AFP to SMB move is rarely just a protocol switch. It usually needs a full audit of the data to find every file with an illegal character and rename it safely before anything moves. It is fiddly, it does not want doing by hand across a few terabytes of project archive and it is exactly the sort of job we take on for clients.
If those characters are still lurking, ask where your backup is. Cloud backup and cloud file services reject the same characters SMB does. So if a file was named with a colon three years ago and nothing has ever complained, that is a strong sign one of two things is true: there is no cloud backup running over that data, or there is one and those exact files have been failing to back up quietly the whole time.
Neither is comfortable, and the second is worse because you think you are covered. The AFP move is a good moment to confirm the backup is real and complete, not just assumed.
What you need to do
The work itself is not dramatic. Done in the right order, nobody in the studio should notice more than a one-off prompt to reconnect. Done in the wrong order, you lose access to live project files. This is the order.
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Find every AFP connection first. Check which Macs mount shares with
afp://, which NAS boxes still have the AFP service enabled, whether any Acronis server is in the path and which machines back up to a Time Capsule. You cannot migrate what you have not found. -
Turn on SMB properly, not just on. Enable SMB3 on the NAS or server, switch on the macOS compatibility options (the Apple extensions that carry Finder metadata and keep Spotlight search working across the share) and set a sensible minimum protocol version. A half-configured SMB share is where the "it feels slow" and "search is broken" complaints come from.
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Sort out Time Machine. Point Time Machine backups at an SMB target or, if they were going to a Time Capsule, move them to current hardware or a proper backup service. Do not leave people silently unprotected.
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Repoint the Macs. Reconnect each machine to the
smb://share, save the credentials to the Keychain and fix the Finder favourites and login items so volumes auto-mount as they did before. This is the bit users see, so it wants doing cleanly. -
Only then turn AFP off. Once SMB is confirmed working for everyone, disable the AFP service on the NAS or retire the Acronis server. Turning it off before the Macs have moved is how you cause the outage you were trying to avoid.
What to watch for
A few things trip studios up, and they are worth naming before you start.
Permissions do not always carry across cleanly. AFP and SMB handle file ownership and access differently, so a share can mount fine and then refuse to let someone save. Check that the people who need write access still have it.
Search matters more than people expect. Creative teams live in Spotlight, hunting for a file across a huge shared media library. That only works if the SMB share is set up to support server-side indexing. Miss this and everyone quietly loses the ability to find anything.
Performance is worth a look while you are in there. SMB on a well-configured 10GbE network is quick, often quicker than the AFP setup it replaces, but a share left on default settings can feel sluggish with large video files. Tuning it once at migration saves a stream of "the drive is slow again" tickets later.
And freelancers and older Macs need thinking about too. Anyone still on an older macOS can keep using AFP for now, which sometimes masks the problem until the last holdout updates. Plan for all of them, not just the machines you can see today.
The bigger picture
None of this is optional and none of it is negotiable. Apple has made the decision for everyone. The only choice you have is whether you move your shares over calmly, on a quiet afternoon with a plan, or whether you find out the hard way when a Mac updates itself and a live job will not open.
For a creative business, the file shares are the studio. This is worth doing properly and doing once.
We can move your shares to SMB for you. We will audit where AFP is still in use, get SMB set up correctly with search and permissions intact, sort your backups and repoint every Mac, with no interruption to live work.