How AFP and SMB enable access to shares on servers, early problems with SMB on Macs, printer access, and limitations with APFS special files.
SMB
We are under warning that macOS 27 is likely to remove support for AFP, and lately some additional requirements for connection to certain servers. This explains how these could affect you.
How to use Share Disk in Recovery on an Apple silicon Mac, how fast it can be. Target Disk Mode on Intel Macs, and some less likely alternatives.
Are you prepared for the removal of support for AFP in a ‘future version of macOS’? Here’s what you need to know, and what you should consider doing.
How Spotlight works, Core and global Spotlight, importing failure, exclusions from indexing, re-indexing, excessive re-indexing, failure to find, iCloud Drive and network shares.
Consider the fidelity of backup copies, the speed of a backup method, and the risk of losing the contents of that backup. And test backups by restoring samples from them.
Although your Mac may be unable to boot into macOS, it might be able to start up in Recovery, or offer its internal SSD in Target Disk Mode.
How to plan and assemble faster backup systems for Time Machine, whether to change I/O policy, and how to minimise their size using exclusions.
Backing up with Time Machine to a NAS or other network storage is different. Here’s an account of how it creates and handles sparse bundle storage in Ventura 13.2.
All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups.
The Eclectic Light Company 