Welcome back to Silly Season, where we all wait to see what the Apple gods have wrought with the new release of the OS that'll come this month.
As most of you already know, since Big Sur, programs that want to copy the OS must rely upon Apple's replicator ('asr') to perform the task. There's no choice: this particular copying ball, and the ability to boot from the result, are entirely in Apple's court.
And at least so far, we're seeing a larger percentage of failures both in replication (typically error 49244, which when decoded and byte stripped is error 92. That means there's non-fatal -- except to the replicator -- corruption) and in boot.
These are rather frustrating for us and, of course, for you. For us, because apart from reporting the issues to Apple, which we have done, we can do nothing about them. Apple has to fix the problems; we cannot work around them.
For you, because until those problems are fixed by Apple, you won't be able to boot from a backup.
Still Works!
That said, your Smart Updates are going to work fine, and remain fully restorable. As explained previously, you need only reinstall the OS and point at the backup when prompted to restore during first boot. This all works great...and when Apple fixes the issues with the replicator and with boot, that will "magically" start working again too.
Meanwhile...
In the meantime, we've been improving SuperDuper. We've worked around some issues with Google Drive (which was incorrectly protecting folders on drives it's not operating on), significantly improved some corner-cases in Smart Update, and made changes needed to work well under Ventura.
Dinner is Served
We don't expect any major problems with this new release, and it has been working well in limited field release. Given that, it's time to roll out a wide public beta, and so here we are.
As always, to use the Beta, download and install the version linked in this post.
Once you're running a Beta release, any subsequent Betas in this series will be offered to you as updates, as will the final, production release.
Once the production release is installed, no further Beta releases will be offered automatically until you opt-in by installing a future Beta.
Enjoy, and get in touch if you have any problems!
