The inevitable point release that follows a major update, now available.
I’m sure it’s clear from everything I write, but I am, as they say, an Old. Part of that involves going through many technological transitions: computers; cars; TV; cable, satellite; cell phones; BBS systems; internet; t…
I’ve probably mentioned on the blog before that I’m a big fan of electric cars. Starting in 2013 with a first generation Tesla Model S P85, both Z and I have been powered by electrons, with two leased BMW i3s and we’ve n…
I don’t talk about it much on the blog, but I get an enormous amount of support email. The quantity can be overwhelming at times, and without some automation, it would be nearly impossible for me to do it alone. Which I…
As much as I want to keep SuperDuper!’s UI as spare as possible, there are times when there’s no way around adding things. For years, I’ve been trying to come up with a clever, transparent way of dealing with missing dri…
In v3.2.2 of SuperDuper!, I introduced the new Auto Wake feature. It’s whole reason for being is to wake the computer when the time comes for a backup to run. Simple enough. No UI beyond the regular scheduling interface…
Executive Summary SuperDuper 3.2 is now available. It includes Mojave support Native Notification Center support (in addition to the existing Growl support) Better scheduling A Finder extension to quickly run copies For…
(OK, yeah, I should have used “The Revenge” for B4. Stop being such a stickler.) Announcing SuperDuper 3.2 B3: a cavalcade of unnoticeable changes! The march towards Mojave continues, and with the SAE (September Apple Ev…
Warning: this is a technical post, put here in the hopes that it’ll help someone else someday. We’ve had a problem over the years that our Backup on Connect LaunchAgent produces a ton of logging after a drive is attached…
SuperDuper! 3.2 B1 was well received. We literally had no bugs reported against it, which was pretty gratifying. So, let’s repeat that with SuperDuper! 3.2 B2! (There’s a download link at the bottom of this post.) Rememb…
Executive summary: sure, it’s the Friday before Labor Day weekend, but there’s a beta of SuperDuper for Mojave at the bottom of this (interesting?) post! It Gets Worse Back when OS X Lion (10.7) was released, the big mar…
Shipping software sucks. It’s not that we don’t want to put the software in the hands of our users. And it’s not that we’re not proud of the work. We do, and we are. What sucks is that you always ship with bugs. Always…
We’ve got something under the tree for all of you, and you get to open your present early. Executive Summary SuperDuper! 3.1 is out, and now allows Time Machine-like restoration from bootable APFS copies. Wait, What?!?!…
The short version Blah-blah-blah what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about-Dave so many words oh, 3.0 is released? Got it. The wordy-but-interesting version Sometimes, on macOS, you run into behavior that really makes you go “…
Gee, do you think the original plan was to release this update on Halloween? Spoooooky! Poof! When “Erase, then copy” is selected, SuperDuper! has always endeavored to match the format of the source. That is, if the sour…
Any program of sufficient complexity ends up having to work around behaviors that are undesirable. That might be a usability issue caused by default framework behavior, due to the interaction model selected by the design…
(I really wanted to embed the teaser trailer for Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts above, but alas it’s a tad NSFW. Really great movie, though.) Content warning: some strong language is used in this post. Not witho…
Good news: we’ve set things up on our update server so that the Beta version will now automatically tell you when there’s a new beta ready, using our regular update mechanism. Here’s how it works: You “opt-in” to the Bet…
Executive Summary Beta 5 is linked at the bottom of the post: we now copy Recovery volumes from both HFS+ and APFS sources to APFS, and “stash” recovery on HFS+ destinations for restoration to APFS if needed. Details, De…
November has rolled around, and that means it’s been a month or so since SuperDuper! was released for El Capitan. Rather than go through a litany of how awesome we are (I hope that’s obvious), I thought I’d take a moment…
Public betas mean more storytelling on the blog. I feel a bit like we’re developing in public—something I don’t really like doing—but I hope it’s interesting to those of you reading the blog and testing both El Capitan a…
Ever since the feature was introduced, we’ve had a small number of users report that Backup on Connect suddenly, with no “inciting event”, stops working for them. I was never able to reproduce the problem, but had a way…
I think the last time I wrote about the Squeezebox was in 2005 (yikes!), but it’s time to virtually attaboy again: the Slim Devices folks have recently released the Squeezebox Boom, and it’s pretty darn great. (I might b…
I know it feels like that from the outside. But from the inside, we’ve been putting out quite a few external beta releases (11 at last count), incorporating feedback from our testers, and carefully observing what users w…
Another week, another Leopard Status Update. Please, hold your cheers and applause until the end. Two parts Although most people think about SuperDuper! as a single application, it’s actually comprised of a number of par…
All those within the sound of my voice, let it be known: I hate the Nokia E61i. Well, hate might be too strong a word. After all, Nokia has done some things right. To start: I decided to give it a try after it got some r…
My friend Jonas Salling has started blogging again, and that’s always a good thing. He’s got some recent posts up there as he tests the WiFi support for Clicker, and the results may surprise you! Jonas is one of the hard…
I freely admit, right at the start of this post, that I switch cell phones too often. A lot of this is because I try to do a lot with my mobile phone, mostly mail and web based. And I want the thing to work well with my…
It wasn’t that long ago that HP had the absolute worst OSX drivers of any major peripheral developer. Their scanners barely worked, their printers sort of worked, the software they loaded was pretty shamefully buggy, fla…
One of the problems with Bluetooth mice and the Mac is that virtually none of them supply drivers. So, your mouse might have a gazillion handy-dandy buttons, but you’ll only get the wheel + right/left click. For USB mice…
When I was a kid, I used a bunch of string, clothespins and pulleys to rig up a gizmo that was supposed to automatically make my bed for me. The idea — which I think I got out of a book (Thanks, Jake!) — was to attach th…
Maurits, of plasticsfuture, has posted an exhaustive, two part review of backup programs on Mac OS X. The first part focuses on the general issue of backing up files on OSX, and the second contains an extensive analysis…
I was reading Wil Shipley’s recent post about his horrible Comcast DVR experience, which has some kind of Microsoft DVR software on it, and it amazed me how lousy it was, compared to my Sony VGX-XL1 Media Center PC. I kn…
Looks like the fine folks at Bare Bones Software have released Yojimbo, an great new take on the organizer-cum-database that many have tried, and failed, to do well… The Yojimbo team has done a great job, addressing many…
More heresy, I know, but I’ve got a Windows XP Media Center Edition box connected to my HDTV, and — after about six months of use — I’m prepared to say that it’s actually pretty good! We all know — from direct gotta-use-…
I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but I’m a fan of the i-mate SP3 Windows Mobile Smartphone. Mobile phones are one of those things that are difficult to generalize: your reaction to the phone is likely based entirely on…
As of about five minutes ago, I finished the new SuperDuper! v2.0 User’s Guide. Barring any egregious errors (there’s always one), I won’t have to revisit again for a little while… a relief. I hope that all of you out th…
A recent post on Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s Tales from the Red Shed reminded me to give a bit more of the philosophy behind what we’re doing in SuperDuper! Wolf points out that we don’t do “temporal versioning” — i.e. tr…
I’ve posted before about my personal “boat anchor” that keeps a Windows machine close by — Microsoft Money. There was just nothing close enough on the Macintosh to allow me to move. I was a bit more successful replacing…