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!

As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.

via Thomas Pindelski’s Photographs, Photographers and Photography. Thanks, Thomas!

One of the interesting things that happens when you do a “live” backup—that is, back up the volume that you’re booted from—is copy files that are currently open.

Normally, this isn’t a huge problem. But, on occasion, things go horribly w0rng. This is a story of one of those things that happens every so often with SuperDuper, and what we’ve done about it. It’s a mite technical, but hopefully interesting.

As you probably know, under OS X files have an owner, a group, and a “mode”. These three things work together to determine who can read, write, execute and do other things to the files on your system.

Less well known are the “flags” that are associated with the files as well. For example, the “immutable” flag—uchg—can be set to prevent a file from being modified, regardless of its “mode”. There are a number of flags that can be associated with files and SuperDuper needs to properly replicate them when copying.

So far so good.

Every so often, though, we get reports of users who have files on their destination volumes that can’t be removed during Smart Update. The error always looks like this:

| 06:02:18 PM | Info | Warning: error clearing immutable flags: 77600100 for: /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c
| 06:02:18 PM | Info | Error removing item: /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c of type: 100000, Operation not permitted
| 06:02:18 PM | Error | SDCopy: Error deleting /Volumes/G5/private/tmp/sort9qlI6c
| 06:02:18 PM | Error | : Operation not permitted

We found that we needed to remove a file on the destination. But when we tried to clear its immutable flag, we couldn’t. The only solution was to use Erase, then copy which—while it worked—was inconvenient.

We were recently finally able to reproduce the issue in house, and what we found was quite curious.

When a file is being written at the same time we’re backing it up, it’s possible for that file to look “weird” in the file system. When the above happens, it seems that the directory entry isn’t completely updated, and—in this unusual state—some flags are set that result in the above behavior. Here’s the above file’s directory entry, listed with “ls -lo” (which lists flags too):

---s-wS--- 1 nobody 3221220928 sappnd,arch,schg 524237 Dec 31 1969 sort9qlI6c

So, weird stuff. The group is complete garbage, and the sappnd and schg flags are set. And—worse—since the system returned that junk to us, we faithfully replicated it on the copy.

Why worse, you might ask? Because while you can set the sappnd and schg flags, you cannot reset them while booted normally. And, schg is the “system immutable” flag: it prevents the file from being deleted. Once you have this flag set, that file’s going nowhere.

The reason for this is that FreeBSD—the Unix that OS X is built on top of—has a concept of “security levels”. By default, our Macs boot up and run in “Secure level 1”, which prevents anyone from writing in certain folders like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem, even with escalated privileges (such as “root” access). And, in secure level 1, schg and sappnd flags cannot be removed.

And how can you get to securelevel 0 or -1, where they can? You have to boot into single user mode.

(You can learn some more about the various BSD security levels at this page.)

Yikes! What that means is once you’ve set these flags, you’ve basically got to go super-geek to unset them.

It’s clear we can’t ask our users to reboot into single user mode to fix this kind of thing, so we decided that the best thing is to detect the “garbage” case as best we could, and—in that situation—mask out the schg and sappnd flags when copying. The data we’re given by the OS is still wrong, but at least the copy won’t suffer for it, and the user won’t have to erase their backup next time around.

This fix, as well as some other stuff I’ll be talking about over the next few days (including native Intel support), will be coming in v2.1 of SuperDuper—keep an eye out for it!

Fraser Speirs on Nice Software (he was kind enough to include SuperDuper! in the list):

...I also think it’s much harder to impart that serious ‘weightiness’ in something that doesn’t really have a physical aspect beyond the CD it comes on. Actually, the product packaging can play a part in my attitude to software. If the box looks serious and has the right texture and weight, I’m already better disposed to it.

He’s absolutely right: it is harder to give a product “presence” these days, especially when you’re “just” selling licenses on the Web. With Shirt Pocket, I’ve tried to concentrate on usability and support—key differentiators in the software market.  I also try to make our products do one “pocket-sized” thing, and do it exceptionally well… and that means a lot of time spent polishing the software and the documentation.

These are all things I did in my previous companies, too, but we would also spend an enormous amount of effort—not to mention money—on the packaging of that content.

BRIEF, for example, had two enclosed Wire-O bound manuals, on paper of significant weight, along with a tri-fold Quick Reference Card, all packaged in a nice slipcase. The graphics were printed using a high quality process, and sealed with a matte plastic film: we knew the documentation was going to be used, and we wanted to make sure it held up well, and looked good in an office. As I recall, this cost us a huge amount per-product. But we were able to charge $195 a seat, and wanted to deliver $195 of value to the user. And —whenever they picked it up—our users got a “nice” feeling from the quality materials and presentation.

The same went for Track Record, although the size of the documentation made a slipcase impractical. Instead, we used the same kind of enclosed binding in a “candy box”, with a separate “How Do I?” guide that was designed with individually cut-back pages that acted as an “index”. Less expensive to produce, but still very “nice”. (Interestingly, when we were acquired, one of the first things Compuware/NuMega did—other than remove the space between “Track” and “Record”—was cut back on the quality of the materials… and raise the price.)

It’s something I miss, actually: the physical embodiment of the work we all put into our software. A giant box full of air and a CD just doesn’t do it for me…