But these days, for doing basic backup of my Mac, the single best app is SuperDuper. Their website, their software, the pricing, the overall design philosophy - all of it is perfectly integrated. They are a great little company with a great little product. I hope they do well!
via Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist. Thanks, Troy!
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 know Microsoft is a big company, but it sounds like the DVR division (if, indeed, they provided the software he was using) not only hasn’t talked to the Media Center team, they haven’t even looked at Media Center. Because MCE doesn’t have any of these problems. (Which isn’t to say it’s perfect, but it’s positively shiny in comparison to what Wil describes.)
I’ve been avoiding anything but analog cable because of exactly this kind of issue—I just don’t want to be forced to take Comcast’s lousy box. The Vista version of MCE, with CableCard support, can’t come soon enough.
Well, today—March 16th, 2006—is Ketzl’s 9th birthday.
It’s a milestone I really never thought Ketzl would reach, but I suppose I shouldn’t be so pessimistic: I didn’t think she’d make it through to last spring, nor this calendar year, but she keeps surprising me.
When she first got her wheelchair, Ketzl was a little surprised, but delighted that she could walk again, on her own. Seconds later, no surprise at all. It’s just one of those things.
The first time she fell over because her back and front legs were too weak to keep her upright: surprised. Seconds later, she looked at me in a way that clearly said “C’mon, Dave. You saw I was going to fall. Get with it!”
Me, I’m surprised every day I wake and she’s still there with us. But mostly, I’m surprised by how deeply I care.
Hey, very cool—macosxhints has Made SuperDuper! a pick of the week!
I’m usually a bit reluctant to recommend TV Shows, because you never know whether future episodes are going to meet the expectations set up by past ones. But, quite a few in, it really seems like AMC’s Hustle is a winner.
A terrifically fun British import, Hustle tells the story of a team of grifters, and a different con every week. Great cast, direction, writing—lots of fun all around. Check it out!
Shirt Pocket announces the immediate availability of SuperDuper! 2.1, the Intel Mac-compatible Universal version of SuperDuper.
Of course, we haven’t just recompiled for Intel—we’ve added new features, polished existing ones, reworked the documentation—all to improve the popular, Eddy Award winning disk copying utility for Mac OS X.
SuperDuper 2.1 adds all this to the impressive improvements of 2.0, including: the ability to easily schedule backups; additional imaging options; more control over shutdown; better AppleScript support; hundreds of UI improvements; and a completely rewritten, task-based User’s Guide.
SuperDuper 2.1 supports both Intel and Power PC Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is a free update for existing users. The unregistered version will perform full backups for free. Registration costs $27.95, and includes many additional timesaving features, including Smart Update for faster backups, Scheduling, and others.
More information, as well as a download link, can be found at http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper.
Thanks for waiting, everyone!
As you probably know from a previous post, we’re working on Universal versions of all of Shirt Pocket’s applications, including SuperDuper. (We’re in late-stage testing with SuperDuper, and it should be out reasonably soon.)
One thing we’ve been able to confirm: disk I/O on the Intel Macs is much faster than it is on the Power PC ones—seemingly about twice as fast.
In fact, SuperDuper builds about twice as fast on the MacBook as it does on a dual-2.5Ghz G5 desktop, and that’s primarily I/O related.
Sweet!
As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.
via Thomas Pindelski’s Photographs, Photographers and Photography. Thanks, Thomas!
Easy target, I know, but oh so true…
What would the Microsoft iPod package look like? Let’s see…
One of the interesting things that happens when you do a “live” backup—that is, back up the volume that you’re booted from—is copy files that are currently open.
Normally, this isn’t a huge problem. But, on occasion, things go horribly w0rng. This is a story of one of those things that happens every so often with SuperDuper, and what we’ve done about it. It’s a mite technical, but hopefully interesting.
As you probably know, under OS X files have an owner, a group, and a “mode”. These three things work together to determine who can read, write, execute and do other things to the files on your system.
Less well known are the “flags” that are associated with the files as well. For example, the “immutable” flag—uchg—can be set to prevent a file from being modified, regardless of its “mode”. There are a number of flags that can be associated with files and SuperDuper needs to properly replicate them when copying.
So far so good.
Every so often, though, we get reports of users who have files on their destination volumes that can’t be removed during Smart Update. The error always looks like this:
| 06:02:18 PM | Info | Warning: error clearing immutable flags: 77600100 for: /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c
| 06:02:18 PM | Info | Error removing item: /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c of type: 100000, Operation not permitted
| 06:02:18 PM | Error | SDCopy: Error deleting /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c
| 06:02:18 PM | Error | : Operation not permitted
We found that we needed to remove a file on the destination. But when we tried to clear its immutable flag, we couldn’t. The only solution was to use Erase, then copy which—while it worked—was inconvenient.
We were recently finally able to reproduce the issue in house, and what we found was quite curious.
When a file is being written at the same time we’re backing it up, it’s possible for that file to look “weird” in the file system. When the above happens, it seems that the directory entry isn’t completely updated, and—in this unusual state—some flags are set that result in the above behavior. Here’s the above file’s directory entry, listed with “ls -lo” (which lists flags too):
---s-wS--- 1 nobody 3221220928 sappnd,arch,schg 524237 Dec 31 1969 sort9qlI6c
So, weird stuff. The group is complete garbage, and the sappnd and schg flags are set. And—worse—since the system returned that junk to us, we faithfully replicated it on the copy.
Why worse, you might ask? Because while you can set the sappnd and schg flags, you cannot reset them while booted normally. And, schg is the “system immutable” flag: it prevents the file from being deleted. Once you have this flag set, that file’s going nowhere.
The reason for this is that FreeBSD—the Unix that OS X is built on top of—has a concept of “security levels”. By default, our Macs boot up and run in “Secure level 1”, which prevents anyone from writing in certain folders like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem, even with escalated privileges (such as “root” access). And, in secure level 1, schg and sappnd flags cannot be removed.
And how can you get to securelevel 0 or -1, where they can? You have to boot into single user mode.
(You can learn some more about the various BSD security levels at this page.)
Yikes! What that means is once you’ve set these flags, you’ve basically got to go super-geek to unset them.
It’s clear we can’t ask our users to reboot into single user mode to fix this kind of thing, so we decided that the best thing is to detect the “garbage” case as best we could, and—in that situation—mask out the schg and sappnd flags when copying. The data we’re given by the OS is still wrong, but at least the copy won’t suffer for it, and the user won’t have to erase their backup next time around.
This fix, as well as some other stuff I’ll be talking about over the next few days (including native Intel support), will be coming in v2.1 of SuperDuper—keep an eye out for it!
