In current state, when DBFS is disabled in a workspace, both the root filestore and mount paths become inaccessible.

What is deprecated are:

• DBFS root storage the workspace‑provisioned filestore - /dbfs/FileStore/, /dbfs/root/ etc.

• DBFS mounts (/dbfs/mnt/...) used to connect external storage. 

Best practices going forward:

• Use external paths instead of mount paths - Azure: Use abfss://<container>@<storageaccount>.dfs.core.windows.net/... directly for ADLS Gen2. AWS: Use s3://<bucket>/<path> directly for S3.

• Unity Catalog Volumes: Adopt Volumes for secure, governed access to external storage. These are accessed via dbfs:/Volumes/... and integrate with UC permissions.

• System paths: Internal locations like MLflow artifact storage (dbfs:/databricks/mlflow/...) remain supported and are managed by Databricks services.