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But that still doesn’t generate revenue for Apple. Some of Apple’s recent decisions in Time Machine development have brought big cost savings: when APFS snapshots were announced at WWDC, Apple revealed that this enabled it to strip some 10,000 lines of code which had previously been required to support ‘mobile Time Machine’, a marginal feature for mobile Macs which has been transformed into one of Time Machine’s strengths. Not only is Apple no longer generating any revenue from selling hardware which relies on Time Machine, but it’s not getting any service revenue from selling on third-party products either. What’s worse for Apple, because of the requirements (self-)imposed by its App Store, all (serious) backup utilities are sold independently.

Backup mac to icloud in recovery mode mac os x#

If anything, there’s an even wider choice today than there was back in 2007 when Time Machine first appeared in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. More surprisingly, third-party backup software and services haven’t been put out of business by Apple. That same period has seen great growth in cloud backup, and despite support for iOS devices backing up to iCloud, Apple hasn’t yet offered any similar macOS service to recoup the cost of its continuing investment in Time Machine.

Instead of quietly dropping Time Machine from macOS, Apple has instead re-engineered it to take best advantage of features in APFS such as snapshots. It’s nearly two years since Apple discontinued them, during which macOS has switched to booting from a new file system.

It’s easy to forget – now that Time Machine is so popular among Mac users – that it was at least partly, if not primarily, intended to support Apple’s Time Capsule products.