Hi, everyone!
I'm happy to say that we're releasing SuperDuper! v2.9 today, at long last. In fact, if you're reading this, it's out. Hooray!
This new release has a large number of enhancements and bug fixes that improve SuperDuper!'s responsiveness and performance. Many of these are longstanding items that required a significant amount of investigation, across many different systems, to diagnose and fix, so we're really grateful to the users who reported the problems and were willing to work with us to run down the underlying issues.
But rather than talk in detail about each (you can get the list of changes in Help > Release Notes), I want to discuss how SuperDuper! interacts with the bane of every copying application: Antivirus programs.
Anti-antivirus
Antivirus programs are getting more popular on the Mac, even while the threat environment doesn't get worse. And they're extending their reach, protecting against things like "phishing" emails. Plus, all Antivirus vendors include non-Mac threat signatures (mainly Windows applications) in with their Mac-specific applications, which tend to flag things that aren't really relevant.
The result of all this (beyond slowing copies down) is that Antivirus users are being informed of potential threats constantly, and before v2.9, each of these pseudo-threats would cause SuperDuper! to stop, because they're flagged as errors (specifically, "Permission Denied" errors) when we try to open the file for copying.
The vast majority of these files are in Junk mail folders. Due to the way Apple Mail (and similar applications) work, those files are cached locally. So, even though the user isn't really interacting with the mail, the files are on disk and copied, and that causes errors to happen much too often.
Given that error isn't Antivirus-specific, we've been reluctant to ignore them: our philosophy has always been to stop on errors (see the "I/O Error Handling" post) But, as more users install the apps, we've decided that the frequency of non-Antivirus related "Permission Denied" errors is so low (I haven't seen one in more than two years), the risk of ignoring these particular errors is minimal.
So, we've added a new preference -- which defaults to ON -- that ignores "Permission Denied" errors. We do log any occurrences, but we don't fail the copy.
This should significantly improve the lives of less technical users (or even technical ones who have Antivirus program use mandated by company policy).
macOS 10.12 - Sierra
To answer the inevitable question, we've been testing v2.9 on current Sierra builds, of course, and initial compatibility is looking good. Remember, though, Sierra is in beta. We do not have the final version to test against, anything can happen between now and Sierra's release, and as such we can't guarantee that we'll be fully compatible with the official, release version of macOS 10.12 until that happens.
Along similar lines, we're not (yet) APFS compatible. The documentation for APFS is still quite sparse, and given that it's in very early preview, we decided it was unwise to release an initially compatible version until it's a bit better documented and closer to done. (It's much easier for us to be pretty confident about the stability of the 8th beta of Sierra than these early releases of APFS.)
In the meantime, though, enjoy the new version, and don't hesitate to contact us if you have problems.
