putting Time Machine icon into menu bar

This reads to me as you are conflating Apple's software backup solution - Time Machine application - with their Time Capsule external hdd hardware accessory.

Yes, Apple no longer supports the Time Capsule backup drive series that was discontinued in 2016. Manufacturer support has gone away, just as it has for every other vintage product ever manufactured. The demise of the Time Capsule is really kind of irrelevant because its function can be replicated with any number of wireless components and external drives.

The Time Machine application is alive and well at Apple and continues to be Apple's preferred method of backup for the Mac computer in macOS, including to wi-fi connected and remote drives.

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

iCloud is not designed to be a backup solution for the Mac. iCloud does provide for backup of iPhone and iPad within limits specified here> Backup methods for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

The vast majority of users are connecting an external drive Directly to their Mac and using it one-for-one to Time Machine backup that exact Mac.

Time Capsule hardware has been discontinued, and most of the rotating magnetic drives inside have died from old age, so that is not exactly a vibrant solution today.

We had an interesting discussion just this week about WIRELESS Time Machine backup solutions that are still current today:

Wireless Time Machine Solutions - Apple Community

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System Settings > Control Center panel. Scroll down on that panel to the Menu Bar only section and enable Show in Menu Bar for Time Machine. Then quit System Settings. Working fine for me.

Tested: macOS Sonoma 14.6.1.

macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 does not display Time Machine on the Menu Bar if you choose to add too many things in System Settings, Control Center to Display on Menu Bar. Remove some of the items you do not need or use regularly if you wish to display Time Machine, Apple's red headed step child that they apparently are trying to get customers to stop buying and using as they would much prefer that everyone rely on iCloud for backups and pay a monthly service charge to do so. Apple does not understand how a big part of retirement is managing costs since people live on fixed incomes and apparently Apple does not understand how buying a Time Machine WiFi wireless router backup system all in one converts a variable expense into a fixed expense over time. The longer poor people or retired people living on limited or fixed incomes own a Time Machine, the lower the cost to have backups per backup. It would be nice if Apple adopted a business model that would allow customers to be free to choose what is best for them but Apple, like so many other leaders in our world wants to dictate what we can and cannot do. Check out the Apple Feedback web page and they do not even list Time Machine with their other hardware and it is difficult to find on their Apple Store web page too when you are looking for hardware. It is becoming obvious that Apple does not want to sell or support these devices. Personally, I think this is a bad idea as Apple may well lose customers if they continue to act like Microsoft, the other old time big I.T. company. What ever happened to customer service and the customer being right. Sure, iCloud is great but so too is Time Machine and how about those people in this world who do not have high speed internet access to use something like iCloud who would prefer to have a backup system like Time Machine. The ugly American is alive and well in the marketing and accounting departments inside of Apple. Apparently, they are cut off from the real world of customers out here.

I have an Apple Wireless Router that provides me with WiFi from modems connected to the internet. It also contains a disk drive of some sort, magnetic, optical, solid state, I have no idea. Would this be the Time Capsule you speak of or would this simply be an Apple Router? I am confused by all of this between the hardware and the software and the fact that Apple seems to mix and match them on their sales web pages, their support web pages and their feedback web pages. Nothing seems consistent to me so it is any wonder that I get terms and names for hardware and software mixed up and confused. That said, thanks for the reply. I figured out that if I select too many System Settings Setup items to display on the Menu Bar at the top of my MacBook, that some will not display as there must be some sort of software size limit on this part of the display. I would have thought the icons from the right would just keep adding until they got all the way over to the left side of the menu items but apparently this is not the case. Anyway, my work around was to turn off some of the menu bar icons in the System Settings Setup submenus where different submenus allow me to choose different icons that can be displayed. Anyway, I suppose all of this makes sense to someone somewhere in the Apple software development world. As for this customer, I suspect I will just continue to struggle to keep up with all of this. It's just too much sometimes. I wish it were all a lot simpler and more straight forward from a hardware and software perspective but over time, things just seem to be getting more and more complicated. C'est la vie.

Well, I don't know about either of these statements but I am now using both Time Machine and iCloud just in case. Apparently I can use either when I get a new device and somehow share my photos and music and a lot of other app data through iCloud or I can restore a backup image from Time Machine. I am not sure what the Apple WiFi router I use is called because someone else said it used to be called Time Capsule. All I know is that Time Machine on my MacBook backs up to my Apple WiFi Router that seems to have some sort of storage in it. Whether it is electro magnetic, optical or solid state storage, I have no idea. I cannot keep up with all of this hardware and software. Everything seems to run together. It's all so confusing and overwhelming at times but I seem to get it working sooner or later. As for the Time Machine icon on the menu bar, I figured out that I selected too many icons for the menu bar at the top right of this laptop and so once I got past a certain number of these, additional icons would not display. I went back into System Settings which is similar to the iOS setup options and turned off some icons that display on the menu bar and then all of a sudden the Time Machine icon appeared. Apparently there is some sort of limit as to how many icons can be displayed from the right menu bar because they never ran over and up to the menu items on the left menu bar. Seems like an undocumented feature. LOL. Anyway, thanks for setting me straight on Time Machine. It really like the way it works and wish Apple would do the same for their iOS devices and allow Time Machine to back those up and restore them too in a similar fashion. I do not care for the way Apple backs up iOS devices to my MacBook via USB port or WiFi and then how that backup is backed up to Time Machine. I would suspect that there could be customers in this world who might only be able to afford iOS devices like phones and pad devices who might like to have an Apple WiFi router that has a backup drive or storage in it that they could use to back up their devices to but if they do not have a MacBook, I suppose they are out of luck. I really wish that iCloud were designed to work a lot more like Time Machine, especially the web page because it would be nice to just have a browser bring up my desktop for a particular device like my MacBook or my iPhone and of course if it supported an iPad and other Apple devices, to me it would be simpler to just select the device I want to see on iCloud and then have it's desktop displayed in the web page window with the iCloud app working in the same way that my MacOS and iOS device desktops work. I suspect this is not a very good idea or Apple would have done iCloud like Time Machine a long time ago. I understand my desktop and I understand Time Machine backups and the desktops I can scroll through to go back in time to find something I want to restore. iCloud, I do not understand. It keeps expanding and storing more and more data from apps all of which run under my desktop and people like you tell me it is not a backup but it sure seems to be expanding to back up or sync more and more data to the Apple cloud servers. Anyway, if you read all of this, perhaps you can understand why a customer like me conflates and confuses the Apple hardware and software. It's just way too much sometimes and I am not even trying to use this stuff to do anything other than use it at home. Businesses must have a real nightmare dealing with all of the different hardware and software vendors, not to mention just one like Apple. C'est la vie. Thanks again

Yes, I figured out I had selected too many setup options that wanted to display their icons on the right menu bar at the top of the MacBook desktop. I removed some of those and all of a sudden the Time Machine icon displayed. I'll try to remember this the next time Apple updates my MacOS and adds new features and options for me to display icons on the top of the desktop. I forget things when I do not see them and when I do see them and use them on a regular or periodic basis, I remember them. There's just too much hidden stuff on these computers. I try to keep learning more and more but don't seem to be able to keep up. There are a lot more people working at Apple on new hardware and software. They out number me exponentially. C'est la vie.

I agree completely. Though iCloud seems to have added a backup for iPhones and iPads, I like syncing our iPhones with our MacBook and relying on our Time Machine backups of those. They saved me from myself when I payed attention to the messages from Apple in System Settings and decided to try more of the iCloud features. You are absolutely correct, it is great for sharing photos. I had a good experience turning on Passwords and Keychain, Contacts and Calendars though I had to do some work on Contacts on our MacBook after turning that on to eliminate duplicates and link some names that appeared to be duplicates but were not quite exact duplicates. Once cleaned up between the two of us, Contacts have been working great on all of our devices.

I made the mistake to try iDrive and did not like having to be connected to WiFi all the time to access my documents so I turned that off. I selected to have iCloud keep a copy on my MacBook but it never did that. Instead it erased all of my Documents as the folder was completely empty. Lucky for me, I could restore them from my Time Machine backup.

I made the same mistake with Music and iCloud. I turned it on to try it thinking it was some sort of iCloud backup but when I turned it off, it removed all of my Music from my devices. The music I own I bought from different places, not iTunes or Music so I guess iCloud Music thought I did not have a right to these even through I bought and paid for them decades ago. Lucky for me, I could restore my songs from my Time Machine backup and sync my iPhones and I have everything working like it used to. I hope I remember to never turn on any other iCloud features. Whatever they are for, they are not for me.

iCloud confuses me. If Apple is moving toward iCloud being a backup of iPhones and iPads and perhaps of MacBooks in the future, then I wish they would take the lead design idea of the Time Machine team because I really like and understand how that works. It just creates a new desktop and I can go back in time to restore anything I need to restore. If the iCloud team used that design to backup iPhones, iPads and MacBooks then customers like me would understand how to use that and not go losing our songs or our documents. If the iCloud team then added in the sync of app data across devices and always kept the data on the originating device if the customer turned off the sync of app data for a particular device then customers like me would be cooking with gas as we would not be able to shoot ourselves in the foot wiping ourselves out and having to go through a lot of hoops to get back where we were. C'est la vie. I wish all of this were simpler. I wish Apple would apply the K.I.S.S. principle to backups and app data syncing because I see the two as similar and frameworks that could go together and be simpler and more straightforward than they are to me now. Oh well, live and learn.

Also same in macOS Ventura 13.6.9

iCloud is NOT a backup solution, it is great for sharing photos.

Time machine has been and continues to get small improvements. It has NOT been abandoned.