Apple first launched Time Machine15 years ago in an attempt to make it as easy as possible for Mac users to back up regularly, and be able to restore anything from a single file to their entire Mac with the minimum of fuss.
Time Machine was launched alongside a neat piece of Apple hardware known as Time Capsule, which combined an AirPort router and a hard drive. The idea was that you would use the networked hard drive with Time Machine to back up portable Macs wirelessly. Time Capsule was discontinued in 2018, but Time Machine lives on and was overhauled following the introduction of the Apple File System (APFS) in macOS Sierra.
You can use any locally connected hard drive or SSD as a destination for Time Machine backups. You can also use a folder on a Mac connected to the same network, or a network-attached storage (NAS) device. Not all NAS work with Time Machine, though; the device must support either a
