"norrebo” blogs about his experiences backing up his PowerBook to an HFS+ volume that he also accesses from his Windows machines using Mediafour’s MacDrive:
via The Simple Life. Glad you like it, “norrebo”, and thanks for sharing the technique you use!The total cost for this adventure was $265.94 ($188 for the disk, $27.95, for SuperDuper!, and $49.99 for MacDrive). But knowing that I’ve got a bootable image of my Powerbook disk? Priceless.
Khoi Vinh, late of Behavior (now the Design Director for the New York Times) and the genius of grid-based designs (I wish my own site looked one-one-millionth as good as stuff he tosses into the trash), recently had a catastrophic hard drive failure (all too common, believe me):
I feel very fortunate, though; immediately after the first signs of trouble, I quit my procrastination and scheduled full backups of the hard drive on alternating nights to two different external FireWire drives — aided in no small part by the sheer awesomeness of Shirt Pocket Software’s invaluable SuperDuper! product. As a result, I lossed less than a day’s worth of work; not perfect, but it could have been loads worse.
SuperDuper! made it exceedingly easy for me to create a complete, bootable mirror of my hard drive, which actually allows me to continue to use the same system — with all of my files, preferences and software tweaks intact — with another Macintosh. I pulled my old Aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 out of retirement and booted it from one of the backup FireWire drives.
via Subtraction, Khoi’s blog. Exactly the idea—glad SuperDuper! could be of service!
Our “production” iMac hit the Shirt Pocket loading dock (aka my front step) yesterday, and I’ve been busily working on updates to netTunes and launchTunes while Bruce works on completing the next update to SuperDuper!, which looks like it will be Universal as well.†
It’s been nice to get back to Xcode after some time off (my design/marketing/documentation/support/etc duties keep me away from it more than I’d like), and it didn’t take more than a few hours to do the netTunes conversion—it’s up and running as I type, and works great.
The big challenge with netTunes was the screen “scraping”—the code has some byte-order dependencies because of pixels, and I wasn’t looking forward to re-writing the “inner loop” to handle all the various cases with Thousands and Millions of colors using both MMX and Altivec. Blegh.
Fortunately, there was an elegant solution. Since the Intel Mac is Tiger-only, I was able to make use of some the new Accelerate framework APIs to eliminate byte order dependencies and—at least under Tiger—about two pages of nasty code. Since the Intel Macs can’t run Panther, I didn’t have to change the already-working parts. The result? Both the Intel and PPC versions benefit, at least under 10.4.
It’s always a good feeling when you can delete code and leave the hardware-specific optimization up to the guys who live and breathe vector processing units, let me tell you.
Anyway, we’re working hard to get the Universal binaries out the door. Obviously, it’s important to do extensive testing using real, production hardware—and we’re doing just that.
You can boot off USB drives on Intel-based Macs. This opens the world of USB 2.0-only drives to Macs users as bootable backup devices. That sound? It’s David Nanian drooling.
from Tales from the Red Shed & Jonathan Rentzsch
Egad, was I that loud? >wipes chin<
Although I haven’t yet seen the full review, some UK Macworld readers have written in to tell me that there’s a full page review of SuperDuper in the latest issue. 4.5 stars, and this great quote:
There are just three groups of people who should be using this excellent utility. Lunatic frontiersmen with a penchant for early beta software, paranoid data hoarders who think that the next crash is just a restart away, and everybody else.
from Richard Dyce’s review in Macworld UK‘s February 2006 issue. Thanks, Richard & Macworld UK!
Hey, cool! It looks like SuperDuper! received a Gold MaxFixIt Toolbox Award this year!
Thanks, MacFixIt!A good backup strategy should be the base of any troubleshooting plan. This versatile disk copying program can make a straight copy, or “clone”—useful when you want to move all your data from one machine to another, or do a simple backup. The real power, however, lies in its ability “checkpoint” your system, preserving your computer’s critical applications and files while you run on a working, bootable copy.
It’s hard to believe another year is gone, but belief has nothing to do with it. A few hours and *poof*—goodbye, 2005.
It’s been a big year for Shirt Pocket, with a number of product releases, none bigger than v2.0 of SuperDuper!—something Bruce and I had been working on since the year before. And our customers seem to love it, which is gratifying indeed.
We were honored to receive another Eddy, this year for SuperDuper! 1.5—our second in a row, after 2004’s Eddy for netTunes. Incredibly cool to get that kind of recognition.
On a more personal level, I started blogging this year, about 5 years late to the party, but at least I’m here and enjoying it.
Zabeth is deep into her third year of Veterinary School, and transitioning to clinical studies early in 2006, which might mean I need to call her “Dr.” soon.
And Ketzl is still with us: happy, healthy (apart from the progressing DM), and the source of much joy and sadness.
No doubt next year will bring more changes, more releases, more joy, more sorrow.
Thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement, criticism and for spreading the word about Shirt Pocket and our products. Without you, the year would have been a lesser one: I’m sure I’ll be talking to more of you on the forums, through the support lines, and on the blog.
I’m looking forward to it. A toast: to the end of 2005, and to you!
Let’s talk, for a moment, about acquiring music.
As you might guess from netTunes, I’m a bit of a music fanatic. I’ve bought a lot of music in my day, and expect to buy a lot more. But, I rarely listen to “music radio”, and rely on friends, happenstance, and sometimes NPR to point me to new stuff.
But it’s not always easy to tell from brief exposure whether a new album is worth buying. Sometimes you need ten, fifteen, twenty plays to decide whether it’s something to add to the “owned” pile. 30 second snippets just won’t do it.
Now, sure, I could follow The Path of the Torrent, but I really don’t like doing that, regardless of whether or not I agree with the RIAA and their positions. And I hate shelling out $15 for something that I end up never playing.
So, what to do?
What I do is pretty simple: I use Rhapsody. Yes, it costs me $10 a month, and is extremely tied to the computer. (And I do want to own the music I love, and do whatever I want with it, especially with regard to device shifting.) But that doesn’t matter, because I use it to sample things. If I find it’s music I want to keep, I buy the CD and pop it into the library. And, if not, it saved me more than the cost of the CD, and the storage for the physical media, too. So I’m finding more music I like, and buying less music I don’t.
And now they’ve got a version for the Mac that—while not full featured—works well for exactly this purpose. You might want to check it out—I’m glad I did.
Let me be the second to announce that SuperDuper! 1.5—the old version—has won a 2005 Macworld Eddy!
Bruce and I are incredibly happy that the editors at Macworld found us worthy of this honor: thanks to all, and to all the customers out there who continue to support us by registering. Hard to believe that both of Shirt Pocket’s main products have won Eddy awards… wow. It’s greatly appreciated.
(By the way, there’s a brief interview with me on today’s Macworld podcast, too, should you not be tired of my babbling...)
And with that, back to work making things even better!
Well, I think the initial support rush is mostly over. Mostly.
At the peak, I was getting 30 support inquiries in every 5 minute period—not all support questions, but all needing a reasonable reply, and it was pretty hard to keep up with. But, I’m caught up (fingers crossed), and we’ve just released 2.0.1, which corrects the issues that came up during the large rollout.
Fortunately, the problems were only encountered by a tiny percentage of users… but we wanted to get the corrections out as soon as we possibly could. Here’s what we fixed.
While I’d have loved 2.0 to be a completely bug free release, it was probably an unrealistic hope—as a previous post said, it’s always something. But, those particular somethings are now fixed.
Overall, SuperDuper 2.0 is working really well for the vast majority of our users, due to the efforts of our beta testers over the past years. Many thousands of you have upgraded over the past few days, and I hope you agree that this is the best release ever.
To all of you, again—thanks for your support!
