As always, a download for the new beta is at the bottom of this post, and if you're uninterested in the changes, you should just scroll down a bit (or, if you have a previous Beta installed, launch SuperDuper and it will offer the update).
Beta 1 - Worked Well!
We had a lot of people download and run the new beta, and a gratifyingly small number of problems, which is always a good sign.
That doesn't mean nothing was wrong with it, of course. A developer's job is never done, and the only program with no bugs in it is, well, theoretical. And hey, it's a Beta—the whole point is to get broader testing so we can fix any problems we missed internally.
So thanks to everyone who wrote in with success and failure reports.
Small Issues
The first beta had some relatively rare problems:
- If there was a space in the path to SuperDuper, we'd give a weird error in the log and fail.
- The versions for some of our launch agents weren't set properly, so they'd get reloaded on every SuperDuper launch.
- On some user systems, Full Disk Access doesn't take after install, and they have to restart after installing the new version. This is because our bundle ID has changed due to notarization and the OS doesn't handle it well. We did our best to try to get it work, and it does for most. One time issue for those it happens to.
Larger Issues
And a few larger issues:
- Disk image backups would fail when copying source volumes with snapshots enabled.
- Some valid scheduled copies would fail to run under Catalina.
- In some circumstances, ownership wouldn't be properly enabled for the system volume of an external Catalina volume group, which made the backup not boot.
Sea of Memories
I could go into detail on the latter problem, but rather than bore you, I'll refer you instead to this old post from 2005 (14 years ago oh god I have been doing this for too long shut up inner monologue i am trying to type here no you shut up) where I discuss the general issue.
The new Beta resolves this issue. Note, though, that SuperDuper doesn't copy the System volume if it's not a different version. So, there are two options if your backup doesn't start up as expected:
Navigate to
/System/Library/CoreServiceson the backup drive and removeSystemVersion.plist. The easiest way to do this is to use Finder'sGo To Foldercommand, in theGomenu, and enter:/Volumes/your-backup-volume/System/Library/CoreServices
Substituting your actual backup volume name for "your-backup-volume". Then, remove
SystemVersion.plist. When you run the new version of SuperDuper, it'll fix all the files without recopying their data, and you should be all set.- Alternatively, you can do an erase-then-copy backup rather than a Smart Update.
That wasn't too painful
See? When I'm tired I can't ramble on as much (yes you can you're rambling now shut up i said inner voice shut up shut up).
Note that if you don't have drives selected in the source and destination pop-ups, the internal updater won't work. Either select drives or download and install manually.
Thanks again to everyone who provided feedback, and an extra tip of the pocket to Ben, Sydney, Mathieu, Jeff, Gary and Norman for their reports and testing help.
