tl;dr
SuperDuper! v3.10 B5 now available with minimal changes.
Medium Hanging Fruit
I discussed the speed of drives in the last post, not just to suggest that people use SSDs (which you should), but also to bring up the issue of "stalling": situations where it looks like SuperDuper! isn't doing anything, because accessing the drive is going slowly.
We've been thinking about this situation for some time. Coming up with a reasonable heuristic to detect what the user might consider "stalling" is a particular problem, as is doing something "sensible" when a stall is detected.
When this happens in a support case, I'll often provide a user with a few Terminal commands that interrogate the file system calls to show what we're doing, both to reassure the user that something is, indeed, happening...but also to provide a path that indicates what we're working on.
That process is clumsy and can be confusing, though. So, it was time to take a baby step towards a solution.
Minimal But Useful
To that end, rather than change the status view when a stall is detected (which, again, isn't easy to detect in a useful way), we've decided to add an "on-demand" bit of logging that I've named "WTFIH", in honor of "What's Going to Happen".
Basically, if the user opens the log window (thus asking the question "What's going on?"), we ask the copy engine what it's doing and add a line to the log that indicates where we're operating "right now".
We'll do this every time they open the log window, and that entry remains part of the log for the copy.
In addition, if the user ever asks the copy process to stop, we log the same info.
Information is Power
This new logging gives the user information about what's happening on demand and adds detail to the log that gives me more data without requiring them to run a Terminal command...and with that, assurance that things are operating as desired.
Every Little Thing
There are other small changes in this release, most of which you probably won't notice. As is our way, as we get close to an official release.
Download Away
And with that, it's time to
As usual, this update will be offered to people who already have a previous Beta version installed. When the final release is made available, that will also be offered to Beta users, after which you'll only be offered normal updates until you manually install a future Beta.
So that's it! Let me know if you have any issues, and thanks for using SuperDuper!
