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
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!
