Apple has scored several new patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office, according to AppleInsider. One of these is Consistent back up of electronic information, documenting the basic concepts behind OS X's Time Machine. The function creates incremental backups of a Mac, allowing people to restore an entire system or individual files back to earlier states. The patent application dates back to August 2006, before Time Machine was introduced in OS X Leopard, but still uses the term "time machine" to refer to the software.
