The Best UI is No UI Saturday, October 27, 2018
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. The whole thing is managed for you.
But What About...?
I expected some pushback but, well, almost none! A total of three users had an issue with the automatic wake, in similar situations.
Basically, these users kept their systems on but their screens off. Rather inelegantly, even when the system is already awake, a wake event always turns the screen on, which would either wake the user in one case, or not turn the screen off again in the other due to other system issues.
It's always something.
Of course, they wanted some sort of "don't wake" option...which I really didn't want to do. Every option, every choice, every button adds cognitive load to a UI, which inevitably confuses users, causes support questions, and degrades the overall experience.
Sometimes, of course, you need a choice: it can't be helped. But if there's any way to solve a problem—even a minor one—without any UI impact, it's almost always the better way to go.
Forget the "almost": it's always the better way to go. Just do the right thing and don't call attention to it.
That's the "magic" part of a program that just feels right.
Proving a Negative
You can't tell a wake event to not wake if the system is already awake, because that's not how wake events work: they're either set or they're not set, and have no conditional element.
And I mentioned above, they're not smart enough to know the system is already awake.
Apple, of course, has its own "dark wake" feature, used by Power Nap. Dark wake, as is suggested by the name, wakes a system without turning on the screen. However, it's not available to 3rd party applications and has task-specific limitations that tease but do not deliver a solution here.
And you can't put up a black screen on wake, or adjust the brightness, because it's too late by the time the wake happens.
So there was no official way to make the wake not wake the screen available to 3rd parties.
In fact, the only way to wake is to not wake at all...but that would require an option. And there was no way I was adding an option. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Smart! Wake!
Somehow, I had to make it smarter. And so, after some working through the various possibilities... announcing... Smart Wake! (Because there's nothing like driving a word like "Smart" into the ground! At least I didn't InterCap.)
For those who are interested, here's how it works:
- Every minute, our regular "time" backup agent looks to see if it has something to do
- Once that's done, it gathers all the various potential schedules and figures out the one that will run next
- It cancels any previous wake event we've created, and sets up a wake event for any event more than one minute into the future
Of course, describing it seems simple: it always is, once you figure it out. Implementing it wasn't hard, because it's built on the work that was already done in 3.2.2 that manages a single wake for all the potential events. Basically, if we are running a minute before the backup is scheduled to run, we assume we're also going to be running a minute later, and cancel any pending wakes for that time. So, if we have an event for 3am, at 2:59am we cancel that wake if we're already running.
That ensures that a system that's already awake will not wake the screen, whereas a system that's sleeping will wake as expected.
Fixes and Improvements
We've also fixed some other things:
- Due to a pretty egregious bug in Sierra's power manager (Radar 45209004 for any Apple Friends out there, although it's only 10.12 and I'm sure 10.12 is not getting fixed now), multiple alarms could be created with the wrong tag.
- Conversion to APFS on Fusion drives can create completely invalid "symlinks to nowhere". We now put a warning in the log and continue.
- Every so often, users were getting timeout errors (-1712) on schedules
- Due to a stupid error regarding Summer Time/Daylight Savings comparisons, sdbackupbytime was using 100% CPU the day before a time change
- General scheduling improvements
That's it. Enjoy!
Download SuperDuper! 3.2.3
Waking the Neighbors Tuesday, October 09, 2018
I'm not going to say Disk Full errors never happen any more. But I am going to say that in the weeks since we released SuperDuper! 3.2, there's been a gigantic drop in their frequency. It's really awesome, both for users (who have fewer failed copies) and for me (since I have fewer support emails). And it's a big improvement in safety, too.
I've said this kind of thing before, but these are the kinds of improvements I love: a basically invisible change that results in a meaningful improvement in people's lives, even when they might not notice things are better.
We want to be invisible. We want things to just work.
You Snooze You Lose (Data)
And along those lines, I'm happy to announce SuperDuper! 3.2.2!
If you've ever read the User's Guide (don't feel bad, I know you haven't), you likely know that we've always had you set a "wake" event in the Energy Saver preference pane. Before SuperDuper 3.1.7, you'd want to set it to a minute before the copy. After, due to changes in macOS 10.13.4, for the same time.
I never liked the fact that you had to do this yourself. In fact, to put it bluntly, it kinda sucked, not only because you had to remember to do it, but because you could only have a single wake event set. That means that multiple copies on different schedules wouldn't necessarily work the way you'd want, because you couldn't guarantee things would be awake.
This actually mattered less back when the system would wake really often overnight, and your backups would run even if you forgot to set the wake event. But Apple's gotten better at keeping your Mac asleep...which also means you have a higher potential to miss backups scheduled when your Mac is sleeping.
That's bad. We don't want you to miss backups.
And now you won't. SuperDuper! 3.2.2 new Auto Wake feature manages it for you, and wakes your system before the scheduled copy. If you have an existing wake event set, you can turn it off - all this is handled for you, regardless of the number of backups you have scheduled, what times they're scheduled for, and what frequency. We'll only wake when we're really going to run a copy.
Combined with our notification center support, you'll know when a successful backup has taken place overnight.
Various Fixes and Improvements
We've made some improvements to Smart Delete in this release. There were a few extremely full disk situations that actually run out of space when creating directories or symlinks (basically, items with no actually data "size"). We weren't engaging Smart Delete in those situations, and now we do.
There was also an overly aggressive error check that was rejecting Smart Delete when it shouldn't. That was fixed, so Smart Delete will work in even more situations.
We've also made some improvements in the way scheduled copies detect failed copies: in 3.2/3.2.1 we'd had some users report they were getting notifications that the backup failed when they actually worked. We're pretty sure we figured out why, and you should always get a notification of success if the backup was successful.
Download Away!
SuperDuper! 3.2.2 is now available as an automatic upgrade, or you can download here:
SuperDuper! 3.2.2
Enjoy, and thanks -- as always -- for your support.
Optional Reading
Here's a great example of Smart Delete doing its thing. I've edited out the boring... well, more boring parts.
But I'll tell you: for backups, I love boring. Boring means it just worked and didn't make a fuss about it. Boring means we did what was needed and handled stuff for you, safely, without your intervention.
That's better than the alternative. You definitely don't want backups to be exciting!
| 10:49:43 AM | Info | SuperDuper!, 3.2.1 (114), path: /Applications/SuperDuper!.app, Mac OS 10.13.6 build 17G65 (i386)
| 10:49:43 AM | Info | Started on Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 10:49 AM
| 10:49:43 AM | Info | Source Volume: "Backup" mount: '/' device: disk1s1 file system: 'APFS' protocol: PCI OS: 10.13.6 capacity: 250.79 GB available: 99.43 GB files: 789,433 directories: 186,693
| 10:49:43 AM | Info | Target Volume: "Backup2" mount: '/Volumes/Backup2' device: disk2s2 file system: 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' protocol: USB OS: 10.13.6 capacity: 165 GB available: 32.3 MB files: 804,881 directories: 186,208
| 10:49:43 AM | Info | Copy Mode : Smart Update
10:49:43 AM | Info | Copy Script : Backup - all files.dset
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| 10:57:35 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-19AN46 of size 2105344 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:35 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 2.1 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:35 AM | Info | Reclaimed 2.2 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 2.7 MB.
| 10:57:40 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-GJXeKR of size 1957888 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:40 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 2 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:40 AM | Info | Reclaimed 3.1 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 3.7 MB.
| 10:57:44 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-yr8G8w of size 1024000 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:44 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 1 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:44 AM | Info | Reclaimed 1.3 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 1.5 MB.
| 10:57:48 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-Yd2AYS of size 1531904 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:48 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 1.5 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:48 AM | Info | Reclaimed 2.2 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 2.4 MB.
| 10:57:51 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-lYyQ8C of size 925696 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:51 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 926 KB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:51 AM | Info | Reclaimed 1.2 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 2.1 MB.
| 10:57:55 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/T/com.apple.Safari/WebKit/MediaCache/CachedMedia-02P2cr of size 1515520 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:55 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 1.5 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:55 AM | Info | Reclaimed 2.6 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 3.7 MB.
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| 10:57:59 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/folders/y3/9l0l08x93k5bpj5stfkmh68w0000gn/0/com.apple.dock.launchpad/db/db-wal of size 2954072 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:57:59 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 3 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:57:59 AM | Info | Reclaimed 3.6 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 6.5 MB.
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| 10:58:08 AM | Info | Unable to preallocate target file /Volumes/Backup2/private/var/db/uuidtext/dsc/C80963E3871231D996884D4A99B15090 of size 45483854 due to error: 28, No space left on device
| 10:58:08 AM | Info | Attempting to reclaim at least 45.5 MB with Smart Delete.
| 10:58:08 AM | Info | Reclaimed 73.8 MB with Smart Delete. Total available is now 76.2 MB.
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| 11:24:38 AM | Info | Evaluated 1003310 items occupying 144.33 GB (186382 directories, 793683 files, 23245 symlinks)
| 11:24:38 AM | Info | Copied 76790 items totaling 12.91 GB (185217 directories, 76156 files, 634 symlinks)
| 11:24:38 AM | Info | Cloned 140.11 GB of data in 2089 seconds at an effective transfer rate of 67.07 MB/s
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| 11:31:42 AM | Info | Copy complete.
Woo! So many potential disk full situations...and success!
Smarty Pants Monday, September 24, 2018
Executive Summary
SuperDuper 3.2 is now available. It includes
In the Less Smart Days of Old(e)
Since the SuperDuper!'s first release, we've had Smart Update, which speeds up copying by quickly evaluating a drive on the fly, copying and deleting where appropriate. It does this in one pass for speed and efficiency. Works great.
However, there's a small downside to this approach: if your disk is relatively full, and a change is made that could temporarily fill the disk during processing, even though the final result would fit, we're trigger a disk full error, and stop.
Recovery typically involved doing an Erase, then copy backup, which took time and was riskier than we'd like.
Safety First (and second)
There are some subtleties in the way Smart Update is done that can aggravate this situation -- but for a good cause.
While we don't "leave all the deletions to the end", as some have suggested (usually via a peeved support email), we consciously delete files as late as is practical: what we call "post-traversal". So, in a depth-first copy, we clean up as we "pop" back up the directory tree.
In human (as opposed to developer) terms, that means when we're about to leave a folder, we tidy it up, removing anything that shouldn't be there.
Why do we do it this way?
Well, when users make mistakes, we want to give them the best chance of recovery with a data salvaging tool. By copying before deleting at a given level, we don't overwrite them with new data as quickly. So, in an emergency, it's much easier for a data salvaging tool to get the files back.
The downside, though, is a potential for disk full errors when there's not much free space on a drive.
Smart Delete
Enter Smart Delete!
This is something we've been thinking about and working on for a while. The problem has always been balancing safety with convenience. But we've finally come up with a idea (and implementation) that works really well.
Basically, if we hit a disk full error, we "peek" ahead and clean things up before Smart Update gets there, just enough so it can do what it needs to do. Once we have the space, Smart Delete stops and allows the regular Smart Update to do its thing.
Smart Update and Smart Delete work hand-in-hand to minimize disk full errors while maximizing speed and safety, with no significant speed penalty.
Everyone Wins!
So there you go: another completely "invisible" feature that improves SuperDuper! in significant ways that you don't have to think about...or even notice. You'll just see (or, rather, not see) fewer failures in more "extreme" copies.
This is especially useful for Photographers and others who typically deal with large data files, and who rename or move huge folders of content. Whereas before those might fill a drive, now the copy will succeed.
Mojave Managed
We're also supporting Mojave in 3.2 with one small caveat: for the moment, we've opted out of Dark Mode. We just didn't have enough time to finish our Dark Mode implementation, didn't like what we had, and rather than delay things, decided to keep it in the lab for more testing and refinement. It'll be in a future update.
More Surprises in Store
We've got more things planned for the future, of course, so thanks for using SuperDuper! -- we really appreciate each and every one of you.
Enjoy the new version, and let us know if you have any questions!
Download SuperDuper! 3.2
3.2 B3: The Revenge! Wednesday, September 12, 2018
(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 Event) happening today, I figured we'd release a beta with a bunch of polish that you may or may not notice.
But First...Something Technical!
As I've mentioned in previous posts, we've rewritten our scheduling, moving away from AppleScript to Swift, to avoid the various security prompts that were added to Mojave when doing pretty basic things.
Initially, I followed the basic structure of what I'd done before, effectively implementing a fully functional "proof of concept" to make sure it was going to do what it needed to do, without any downside.
In this Beta, I've moved past the original logic, and have taken advantage of capabilities that weren't possible, or weren't efficient, in AppleScript.
For example: the previously mentioned com.shirtpocket.lastVolumeList.plist was a file that kept track of the list of volumes mounted on the system, generated by sdbackuponmount at login. When a new mount occurred, or when the /Volumes folder changed, launchd would run sdbackuponmount again. It'd get a list of current volumes, compare that to the list of previous volumes, run the appropriate schedules for any new volumes, update com.shirtpocket.lastVolumeList.plist and quit.
This all made sense in AppleScript: the only way to find out about new volumes was to poll, and polling is terrible, so we used launchd to do it intelligently, and kept state in a file. I kept the approach in the rewritten version at first.
But...Why?
When I reworked things to properly handle ThrottleInterval, I initially took this same approach and kept checking for new volumes for 10 seconds, with a sleep in between. I wrote up the blog post to document ThrottleInterval for other developers, and posted it.
That was OK, and worked fine, but also bugged me. Polling is bad. Even slow polling is bad.
So, I spent a while reworking things to block, and use semaphores, and mount notifications to release the semaphore which checked the disk list, adding more stuff to deal with the complex control flow...
...and then, looking at what I had done, I realized I was being a complete and utter fool.
Not by trying to avoid polling. But by not doing this the "right way". The solution was staring me right in the face.
Block-head
Thing is, volume notifications are built into Workspace, and always have been. Those couldn't be used in AppleScript, but they're right there for use in Objective-C or Swift.
So all I had to do was subscribe to those notifications, block waiting for them to happen, and when one came in, react to it. No need to quit, since it's no longer polling at all. And no state file, because it's no longer needed: the notification itself says what volume was mounted.
It's been said many times: if you're writing a lot of code to accomplish something simple, you're not using the Frameworks properly.
Indeed.
There really is nothing much more satisfying than taking code that's become overly complicated and deleting most of it. The new approach is simpler, cleaner, faster and more reliable. All good things.
Download
That change is in there, along with a bunch more. You probably won't notice any big differences, but they're there and they make things better.
Download SuperDuper! 3.2 B3
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 and a copy is running. The logging looks something like:
9/2/18 8:00:11.182 AM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (sdbackuponmount) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 60 seconds.
Back when we originally noticed the problem, over 5 years ago, we "fixed" it by adjusting ThrottleInterval to 0 (found experimentally at the time). It had no negative effects, but the problem came back later and I never could understand why...certainly, it didn't make sense based on the man page, which says:
ThrottleInterval <integer>
This key lets one override the default throttling policy imposed on jobs by launchd. The value is in seconds, and by default, jobs will not be spawned more than once every 10 seconds. The principle behind this is that jobs should linger around just in case they are needed again in the near future. This not only reduces the latency of responses, but it encourages developers to amortize the cost of program invocation.
So. That implies that the jobs won't be spawned more often than every n seconds. OK, not a problem! Our agent processes the mounts changes quickly, launches the backups if needed and quits. That seemed sensible--get in, do your thing quickly, and get out. We didn't respawn the jobs, and processed all of the potential intervening mounts and unmounts that might happen in a 10-second "throttled" respawn.
It should have been fine... but wasn't.
The only thing I could come up with was that there must be a weird bug in WatchPaths where under some conditions, it would trigger on writes to child folders, even though it was documented not to. I couldn't figure out how to get around it, so we just put up with the logging.
But that wasn't the problem. The problem is what the man page isn't saying, but is implied in the last part: "jobs should linger around just in case they are needed again" is the key.
Basically, the job must run for at least as long as the ThrottleInterval is set to (default = 10 seconds). If it doesn't run for that long, it respawns the job, adjusted by a certain amount of time, even when the condition isn't triggered again.
So, in our case, we'd do our thing quickly and quit. But we didn't run for the minimum amount of time, and that caused the logging. launchd would then respawn us. We wouldn't have anything to do, so we'd quit quickly again, repeating the cycle.
Setting ThrottleInterval to 0 worked, when that was allowed, because we'd run for more than 0 seconds, so we wouldn't respawn. But when they started disallowing it ("you're not that important")...boom.
Once I figured out what the deal was, it was an easy enough fix. The new agent runs for the full, default, 10-second ThrottleInterval. Rather than quitting immediately after processing the mounts, it sleeps for a second and processes them again. It continues doing this until it's been running for 10 seconds, then quits.
With that change, the logging has stopped, and a long mystery has been solved.
This'll be in the next beta. Yay!
Technical Update! Thursday, September 06, 2018
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.)
Remember - SuperDuper! 3.2 runs with macOS 10.10 and later, and has improvements for every user, not just those using Mojave.
Here are some technical things that you might not immediately notice:
If you're running SuperDuper! under Mojave, you need to add it to Full Disk Access. SuperDuper! will prompt you and refuse to run until this permission has been granted.
Due to the nature of Full Disk Access, it has to be enabled before SuperDuper is launched--that's why we don't wait for you to add it and automatically proceed.
As I explained in the last post, we've completely rewritten our scheduling so it's no longer in AppleScript. We've split that into a number of parts, one of which can be used by you from AppleScript, Automator, shell script--whatever--to automatically perform a copy using saved SuperDuper settings.
In case you didn't realize it: copy settings, which include the source and destination drives, the copy script and all the options, plus the log from when it was run, can be saved using the File menu, and you can put them anywhere you'd like.
The command line tool that runs settings is called sdautomatedcopycontroller (so catchy!) and is in our bundle. For convenience, there's a symlink to it available in ~/Library/Application Support/SuperDuper!/Scheduled Copies, and we automatically update that symlink if you move SuperDuper.
The command takes one or more settings files as parameters (either as Unix paths or file:// URLs), and handles all the details needed to run SuperDuper! automatically. If there's a copy in progress, it waits until SuperDuper! is available. Any number of these can be active, so you could throw 20 of them in the background, supply 20 files on the command line: it's up to you. sdautomatedcopycontroller manages the details of interacting with SuperDuper for you.
- We've also created a small Finder extension that lets you select one or more settings files and run them--select "Run SuperDuper! settings" in the Services menu. The location and name of this particular command may change in future betas. (FYI, it's a very simple Automator action and uses the aforementioned
sdautomatedcopycontroller.)
We now automatically mount the source and destination volumes during automated copies. Previously, we only mounted the destination. The details are managed by sdautomatedcopycontroller, so the behavior will work for your own runs as well.
Any volumes that were automatically mounted are automatically scheduled for unmount at the end of a successful copy. The unmounts are performed when SuperDuper quits (unless the unmount is vetoed by other applications such as Spotlight or Antivirus).
- There is no #5.
sdautomatedcopycontroller also automatically unlocks source or destination volumes if you have the volume password in the keychain.
If you have a locked APFS volume and you've scheduled it (or have otherwise set up an automated copy), you'll get two security prompts the first time through. The first authorizes sdautomatedcopycontroller to access your keychain. The second allows it to access the password for the volume.
To allow things to run automatically, click "Always allow" for both prompts. As you'd expect, once you've authorized for the keychain, other locked volumes will only prompt to access the volume password.
We've added Notification Center support for scheduled copies. If Growl is not present and running, we fall back to Notification Center. Our existing, long-term Growl support remains intact.
If you have need of more complicated notifications, we still suggest using Growl, since, in addition to supporting "forwarding" to the notification center, it can also be configured to send email and other handy things.
Plus, supporting other developers is cool. Growl is in the App Store and still works great. We support 3rd party developers and think you should kick them some dough, too! All of us work hard to make your life better.
Minor issue, but macOS used to clean up "local temporary files" (which were deleted on logout) by moving the file to the Trash. We used a local temporary file for Backup on Connect, and would get occasional questions from users asking why they would find a file we were using for that feature in the trash.
Well, no more. The file has been sent to the land of wind and ghosts.
That'll do for now: enjoy!
Download SuperDuper! 3.2 B2
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 marketing push was that iOS features were coming "Back to the Mac", after the (pretty stellar) Snow Leopard update that focused on stability, but didn't add much in the way of features.
Mojave (10.14) also focuses on stability and security. But in some ways, it takes an iOS "sandbox" approach to the task, and that makes things worse, not only for "traditional" users who use the Mac as a Mac (as opposed to a faster iPad-with-a-keyboard), but for regular applications as well.
Not Just Automation
Many more advanced Mac users employ AppleScript or Automator to automate complicated or repetitive tasks. Behind the scenes, many applications use Apple Events--which underlay AppleScript--to ask other applications, or parts of the system, to perform tasks for which they are designed.
A Simple Example
A really simple example is Xcode. There's a command in Xcode's File menu to Show in Finder.
When you choose that command, Xcode sends an Apple Event that asks Finder to open the folder where the file is, and to select that file. Pretty basic, and that type of thing has been in Mac applications since well before OS X.
In Beta 8 of Mojave, that action is considered unsafe. When selected, the system alarmingly prompts that "“Xcode” would like to control the application “Finder”." and asks the user if they want to allow it.
Now, there's no real explanation as to why this is alarming, and in this case, the user did ask to show the file in Finder, so they're likely to Allow it, and once done, they won't be prompted when Xcode asks Finder to do things.
A More Complex Example
Back in 2006. when we added scheduling to SuperDuper, we decided to do it in a way that was as user-extensible as possible. We designed and implemented an AppleScript interface, used that interface to run scheduled copies, and provided the schedule driver, "Copy Job", in source form, so users would have an example of how to script SuperDuper.
That's worked out well, but as of Mojave, the approach had to change because of these security prompts.
Wake Up, Time to Die
An AppleScript of any reasonable complexity needs to talk to many different parts of the system in order to do its thing: that is, after all, what it's designed for.
But those parts of the system aren't necessarily things a user would recognize.
For example, our schedule driver needs to talk to System Events, Finder and, of course, SuperDuper itself.
When a schedule starts, those prompts suddenly appear, referencing an invisible application called Copy Job. And while a user might recognize a prompt for SuperDuper, it's quite unlikely they'll know what System Events is, or why they should allow the action.
Worse, a typical schedule runs when the user isn't even present, and so the prompts go without response, and the events time out.
Worse still, a timeout (the system defaults to two minutes) doesn't re-prompt, but assumes the answer is "no".
And even worse yet, a negative response fundamentally breaks scheduling in a way users can't easily recover from. (In Beta 8. a command-line utility is the "solution", but asking the user to resort to an obscure Unix command in order to repair this is unreasonable.)
That's just one example. There are many others.
Reaching an Accommodation
Of course, this is not acceptable. We can't have everything break randomly (and confusingly) for users just because they've installed a new OS version with an ill-considered implementation detail.
Instead, we've worked around the problem.
Scheduling has been completely rewritten for the next version of SuperDuper. We're still using our scripting interface, but the schedule driver is now a command-line application that doesn't need to talk to other system services via AppleEvents to do the things it needs to do. It only needs to talk to SuperDuper, and since it's signed with the same developer certificate, it can do that without prompting. A link to the beta with this change, among others, is at the end of the post.
This does mean, unfortunately, that users who edited our schedule driver can't do that any more: our driver has to be signed, and thus can't be modified. (I'll have more on this in a future post.)
It's more than a bit ironic that an approach that avoids the prompting can do far more, silently, than the original ever could, but that's what happens when you use a 16-ton weight to hammer in a security nail.
When SuperDuper! is started, we've added a blocking prompt for Full Disk Access, which is required to copy your data in Mojave, and--if you're using Sleep or Shut Down--access to the aforementioned System Events, which is used to provide those features. Still ugly, but we've done what we can to minimize the prompts.
What a View
This should remind you of one thing: Windows Vista.
Back when Microsoft released Vista, they added a whole bunch of security prompts that proved to be one of worst ideas Microsoft ever had. And it didn't work. It annoyed users so much, and caused such a huge backlash that they backed off the approach, and got smarter about their prompting in later releases.
Perhaps Apple's marketing team needs to talk to engineering?
Those who ignore history...
Download SuperDuper! 3.2 Public Beta 1
iFixIt recently released a video showing how to upgrade to an SSD using SuperDuper.
Thanks, iFixIt!
This isn’t the first time Antivirus programs have caused problems for us, and it won’t be the last. But, if you’re using Sophos Antivirus and are seeing the error
| 05:21:41 PM | Info | ......COMMAND => Blessing OS X System Folder
| 05:21:41 PM | Error | umount(/private/var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/T/bless.5cmA): Resource busy -- try 'diskutil unmount'
| 05:21:41 PM | Error | /sbin/umount returned non-0 exit status
the problem is that Sophos’ “Anti-Ransomware” module is preventing macOS’s bless tool from working.
This is just another example of Antivirus programs trying to “help” but, in the end, making a system less reliable in an obscure, confusing way.
My guess is that it’s actively scanning the Preboot volume that bless has mounted in order to properly set up things for boot, and thus vetoes the ejection of that volume when bless tries to eject it.
One of the fundamental jobs of an antivirus tool is to not break basic system functionality while doing its thing. At least in its current release, Sophos’ Anti-Ransomware feature fails at that task. If you’re using it, and you’re getting errors, you’ll have to turn that feature off until they fix their bug.
Hey, folks.
As you may know, one of Mojave's focuses is stability and security. Part of that is denying applications, including those with 'root' privileges, the ability to access certain files on the drive.
This started in High Sierra's SIP implementation, where certain system files were inaccessible. But Mojave extends this protection to "sensitive" user files as well.
As you might expect, not being able to copy files throws a bit of a wrench into the whole "backing up" process, and bad things happened when we tried (crashes, etc).
Fortunately, as of Public Beta 2, you can now tell Mojave that SuperDuper is a "good actor", and you should allow us to access your data. Mojave doesn't prompt you to "OK" us, however, so you need to do this before you run.
Open System Preferences and switch to the Security & Privacy preference pane. Under Privacy > Application Data (Full Disk Access in later builds), add SuperDuper.
Once that's done, your backup should work.
