Where I humiliate myself in public: release notes, backup deep-dives, and various and sundry other things that strike my fancy.
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Generals and Majors For those whose time is so valuable that my blathering would be too costly, SuperDuper v4.0.3 is now available for your enjoyment. For the Smart (Update) Set There are a bunch of changes in this update, covered, as usual, in the release notes , but the one that you might notice immediately is that ⚡️Turbo Smart Update should happen more often, and start more quickly than…
Before I crash after a long day working in the code mines (v4.0.3 is coming along nicely), I thought I’d put on my marketing/appreciation/thanks hat. Michael Tsai of SpamSieve , DropDMG , and the MJTsai blog (all of which, if you’re not using/reading, well, you should) posted a review of SuperDuper 4 on his blog today . Dan Moren of sixcolors …or should I say novelist Dan Moren (great books you…
For the Executive Set SuperDuper v4.0.2 is now available, both in-app and as a direct download . It has “Bug fixes and performance improvements”. For Those With a Bit More Patience Doing this kind of work requires patience, focus, and care. And recognition that no matter how carefully you test, no matter how many configurations you put in your test suite, no matter how diligent your external…
John Siracusa, of Hypercritical and Accidental Tech Podcast fame (not to mention the late, lamented, ridiculously detailed macOS reviews on Ars Technica ) has a review of SuperDuper! 4 up on this week’s ATP. (Spoiler alert: he likes it!) Check out episode 703 here .
Executive Summary SuperDuper! 4.0.1 now available in-app, and as a direct download . Never have I ever Never have I ever released a major version without following it up with a “quick fix” release. The saying is true: no plan survives an encounter with the public. Or, as Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth. So, thanks for punching me, oh-so-lightly, in the…
Executive Summary Brand new, top-to-bottom rewrite of SuperDuper now available . All the Details 22 years. SuperDuper has had an impressive run. It has lasted, in its original form, for longer than any other product I’ve ever been involved with over the (so far) 43 years of my working career. Somehow, Shirt Pocket—and SuperDuper—has been more than half of that. Over those years, most of the design…
We’re happy to announce the release of SuperDuper v3.12 (with a forthcoming, identical update to the v3.20 Beta), which has a number of improvements, bug fixes, and a fix for security issue CVE-2025-69604. This version is available through the normal update mechanism in SuperDuper, or you can download it from here . Security First - CVE-2025-69604 Let’s discuss the security issue first. In…
Mistakes are a part of life. They’re not a great part, but when viewed “correctly”, they’re an opportunity. Well, we have three opportunities, brought to our attention by a security researcher. They’re security vulnerabilities that have been in SuperDuper! since the very first version, released almost 22 years ago. Today, we’re releasing fixes for the current release (the SuperDuper! v3.20 Beta is…
So, Tahoe. As you’ve seen here, we’ve had a series of Betas that have focused on compatibility, fixing some longstanding-but-minor bugs, and adding some enhancements. The Best Laid Plans We had some additional things in mind for this cycle, which is why we had given it a major version number change - v4.0. This beta version, though, is v3.20, and the reason is quite simple: we ran into enough…
A quick update with some minor changes, but one thing we’ve never done before. We’ve automatically offering this Beta update to any user who is running SuperDuper! and a Tahoe Beta. We think it’s important for all users running Tahoe to run the SuperDuper Beta, since there are specific fixes in there that deal with Tahoe peculiarities. Since they’ve already opted in to the Tahoe Beta, we figure…
When I write a blog post, I try to put some generally useful information along with the “required” stuff. And when it came to writing the v3.10 post, I just couldn’t come up with anything worth writing about; everything was discussed in the previous posts. But today, we’ve got our first Beta of v4.0 (trumpets)! Download SuperDuper v4.0 B1 A little tidbit first, though. Flooding the Zone As I’ve…
tl;dr SuperDuper! v3.10 B5 now available with minimal changes. Medium Hanging Fruit I discussed the speed of drives in the last post, not just to suggest that people use SSDs (which you should), but also to bring up the issue of “stalling”: situations where it looks like SuperDuper! isn’t doing anything, because accessing the drive is going slowly. We’ve been thinking about this situation for some…
tl;dr—Beta 4 of v3.10 is now available, and can be downloaded with the link at the bottom of this post, or via the auto-updater inside SuperDuper itself. Progress Report So, our last update was a big one, internally, and the results, so far, are quite promising, with nearly 100% boot success. People who are having trouble are typically using slow destination devices. If they’re too slow, not only…
tl;dr SuperDuper v3.10 B3 is now available, with various improvements, including significantly improved bootabilty for users who previously had problems. A download is available at the bottom of this post. Or you can continue to read… The Story As you know, since Big Sur or so, external boot has become more difficult. Apple stopped allowing 3rd parties to copy the OS for security reasons, and…
Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with Erase, then copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary (but feel free to install our v3.10 Beta 2, below). Note that this does not mean boot from the copy will work in all situations (but, again, we have no control over that). But at least the copy can be made…
Well, although we can’t do anything about macOS 15.2 breaking the replicator , we can continue to work on the things we have control over. And, in that spirit, here’s Beta 2 of SuperDuper! v3.10. Minimal Changes Not a lot new in this version, actually, but it’s gone through additional weeks of external and internal testing. Changes include: Thrilling Snapshot Unmounting! That’s right, we found…
macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error. In the past, Resource Busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means, on most systems, there’s no…
Welcome to the first Beta release of SuperDuper! v3.10—the cycle begins again. For those who don’t know the drill: if you download and install this Beta release, you will automatically receive subsequent Beta releases until the final release of v3.10. Once that comes out, it will also be offered, and then you’ll only receive normal releases…until and unless you install a Beta release in the…
For a while I thought that, maybe, I’d somehow managed to delete the v3.9 blog post. But, it looks like, somehow, I didn’t write it, maybe? I don’t even know any more. No Matter Well, in the end, it’s OK, because the semi-inevitable point release is out—v3.9.1—and fixes an issue that was causing Catalina (10.15)’s dynamic library cache builder to crash. While we were working on that we turned off…
Not much to say, other than “we fixed a bug”. SuperDuper checks the version of the OS on a give drive by checking the SystemVersion.plist, which is stored in /System/Library/CoreServices. On some systems, we’ve found that that file is missing a value that we assumed would always be there. That assumption led to a crash at launch for some (two) people. This version fixes that problem. Download…
tl;dr (although this is unlikely to be “l”) - SuperDuper v3.9 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the release candidate for v3.9. (St|F)umbling Towards Sequoia Probably the wrong headline, since our Sequoia testing has gone well. Beta 4 has some changes that fix a longstanding minor-but-annoying issue: an ‘unlocked’ copy of SuperDuper, if launched from a backup drive (typically because a…
