What is smbd and should I allow full access to disk?

smbd is part of macOS. It handles file and printer sharing services in your Mac. If you want to connect 2 or more Macs on your network in order to copy files between them, or share a printer among multiple Macs, you need smbd. You should allow Full Disk Access, otherwise it would not work properly. There is no downside to giving Full Disk Access to smbd.

If you do not use file sharing with other Mac, Windows, Linux, etc… users, you can disable it. See Barney-15E’s System Settings description.

andreafromny wrote:

What is file sharing?

System Settings > General > Sharing > File Sharing.

smbd is the the Server Message Block daemon which handles network sharing over the SMB/CIFS protocol.

Do you use File Sharing? It depends on what you want to share out. Some areas, like inside your home folder, require smbd to have full disk access to share them out.