But try running your backups over a network, perhaps to a desktop M1 Mac, and little seems to have changed since 2008. At last we have a bundled backup system which performs well and shouldn’t corrupt its file system every few weeks. Instead, it pulls every trick in the book of APFS, building off-volume snapshots complete with their clone files. In its latest incarnation, it has finally done away with the millions of files and hard links which it needed to store backups on HFS+.

Time Machine has also changed to keep pace with these increasing demands.

Users happily let their Photos libraries grow to contain more than 100,000 images, and there are plenty of other items that we go around with which have become increasingly hard to back up. Apps like Xcode are now not only almost 30 GB in size, but contain more than half a million individual items (even though the Finder claims there are just under 100,000). What we store on today’s laptops has also grown both in size and complexity. M1 MacBook Air and Pro models are far faster and more capable than the Intel Core 2 Duo processors typical of the better laptops in 2008. But that use case – of someone returning to base with a MacBook Pro and leaving it to back up the day’s work over Wi-Fi – proved popular and generally successful.Ī great deal has changed in the thirteen years since so many took to using Time Machine and Time Capsules. First full backups from the modest internal storage of MacBook Pros of the day usually required to be run overnight, even when performed over a wired Ethernet connection. Essentially combined Wi-Fi routers and network storage (NAS) systems, internally they ran NetBSD as their operating system on ARM processors, and had rotating hard disks of up to 3 TB capacity.Īlthough Time Capsules made a name for themselves for convenience, they were never known for their speed.

Over the next ten years, it must have sold many millions of what it termed ‘backup appliances’. One of the main reasons for Apple adding Time Machine to Mac OS X was for its Time Capsules.

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