Despite being down and mostly out with a cold/flu, I’ll be appearing on The Tech Night Owl LIVE tonight, May 4th, talking about SuperDuper!, netTunes, launchTunes, and desperately trying to not cough up a chunk of lung.

You can tune into the broadcast from 6:00 to 8:00 PM Pacific, 9:00 to 11:00 PM Eastern, at http://www.techbroadcasting.com. An archive of the show will be available for downloading and listening within four hours after the original broadcast.

You can also access the show’s Podcast feed, available at: http://www.techbroadcasting.com/nightowl.xml.

Trying to set a record for number of posts in a day or two here at Shirt Pocket Watch… some more praise today, and a five-star review (w00t!) from the fine folks at Macworld:

Whether you use it to make one-off clones for IT work or to make scheduled, bootable copies of your Mac’s hard drive for backup purposes, SuperDuper is the best clone-based backup utility I’ve seen—and the backup utility to which I trust my own data. Its clear interface, outstanding feature set, informative documentation, and—most importantly—fail-safe performance have made it an indispensable part of my Mac toolbox.

Dan Frakes writing in Mac Gems. Thanks, Dan!

Looks like SuperDuper! 1.5.5 was nominated for a 2006 Editor’s Choice award by Macworld UK in the “Storage” category. Cool, and congratulations to the other nominees, too!

Maurits, of plasticsfuture, has posted an exhaustive, two part review of backup programs on Mac OS X. The first part focuses on the general issue of backing up files on OSX, and the second contains an extensive analysis of more backup programs than I’ve seen covered in one place—freeware, shareware and commercial.

In my blog, I tend to talk about the usability aspects of SuperDuper!, because that’s where I focus my efforts. I can only do that because Bruce and I have very high standards for the rest of SuperDuper!, and Bruce’s copy engine is second to none. In fact, in this review of 16 tools, SuperDuper! was the only tool that worked correctly:

The surprising conclusion is that almost all Macintosh backup or cloning programs do not fulfil (sic) their primary purpose, i.e., they are not able to restore files with all associated metadata. This is despite the fact that many of the tools are advertised as “safe”, “accurate”, “bug-free”, etc. The tools that fail are harmful because they generate a false sense of security. Even more exasperating is that many of these tools cost (significant amounts of) money. The only laudable exception is the great SuperDuper application, which performs flawlessly. (Emphasis mine.)

Many thanks to the pseudonymous Maurits for putting this whole thing together: it couldn’t have been easy to do.

Today, I spent some time testing out the soon to be released update to netTunes along with Salling Clicker’s “Clicker Network”. My setup here is different that most, no doubt, but here’s what was involved:

1. Music server running iTunes
2. Various AirPorts running a WDS network bridging all over the house
3. My main PowerMac, which I’m logged into, running the netTunes client, controlling my Mac mini, which is connected to my stereo
4. iChat, set to show my current track
5. My phone, running the Clicker Client, connected via Bluetooth to the PowerMac, but bridged over Clicker network to the Mac mini
6. The Mac mini, which has no local music, using shared playlists to connect back to the music server
7. Two Intel Macs connecting to the Mac mini’s netTunes server
8. And, finally, the netTunes server, running on the Mac mini

OK, so—sitting in front of my PowerMac, I could see what I was playing on the Mac mini, because netTunes was showing me the iTunes running over there. And I could control it from that or the two Intel Macs also viewing the same thing.

Clicker—even though it was connected to my PowerMac, was showing me what was playing on the Mac mini, since it was using Clicker Network… and it updated properly when I made changes with netTunes.

My iChat status was showing the track I was playing on the mini, even though I was on the PowerMac, because netTunes is smart enough to act like iTunes and send out the proper notifications to make that happen.

And—no matter what I used to interact with the music—Clicker, netTunes, whatever—everything just worked exactly the way you’d expect.

I’m telling you, my smug sense of self-satisfaction was probably detectable from space.

I just wanted to give a bit of a Heads-Up to Teh Internets Users who might be relying on the Restore tab of the DVD that came with their Intel Mac.

Unfortunately, the copy of Disk Utility that’s on those DVDs (I’ve checked the one for the MacBook Pro and the iMac, but I don’t have an Intel Mac mini to test with) has a non-functioning Restore tab: the tab relies on drag-and-drop to set the destination volume (if you’re not using an image, the source as well), and—due to what looks to be a bug in this specific version of the utility—drag and drop does not work in the volume sidebar.

This means it’s not possible to restore a volume when booted from this DVD (regardless of how that volume was created). If you’re relying on the DVD’s restore functionality, I suggest installing a minimal system to a small partition on an external drive instead, as the Disk Utility that’s part of Tiger itself works just fine.

But these days, for doing basic backup of my Mac, the single best app is SuperDuper. Their website, their software, the pricing, the overall design philosophy - all of it is perfectly integrated. They are a great little company with a great little product. I hope they do well!

via Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist. Thanks, Troy!

Hey, very cool—macosxhints has Made SuperDuper! a pick of the week!

Shirt Pocket announces the immediate availability of SuperDuper! 2.1, the Intel Mac-compatible Universal version of SuperDuper.

Of course, we haven’t just recompiled for Intel—we’ve added new features, polished existing ones, reworked the documentation—all to improve the popular, Eddy Award winning disk copying utility for Mac OS X.

SuperDuper 2.1 adds all this to the impressive improvements of 2.0, including: the ability to easily schedule backups; additional imaging options; more control over shutdown; better AppleScript support; hundreds of UI improvements; and a completely rewritten, task-based User’s Guide.

SuperDuper 2.1 supports both Intel and Power PC Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is a free update for existing users. The unregistered version will perform full backups for free. Registration costs $27.95, and includes many additional timesaving features, including Smart Update for faster backups, Scheduling, and others.

More information, as well as a download link, can be found at http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper.

Thanks for waiting, everyone!

As you probably know from a previous post, we’re working on Universal versions of all of Shirt Pocket’s applications, including SuperDuper. (We’re in late-stage testing with SuperDuper, and it should be out reasonably soon.)

One thing we’ve been able to confirm: disk I/O on the Intel Macs is much faster than it is on the Power PC ones—seemingly about twice as fast.

In fact, SuperDuper builds about twice as fast on the MacBook as it does on a dual-2.5Ghz G5 desktop, and that’s primarily I/O related.

Sweet!