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.
- SuperDuper! was crashing for some users immediately on startup, or soon thereafter. We couldn’t reproduce that to save our lives, but thanks to a lot of helpful users, we finally determined that it had to do with large “crontab” files, and an off by one error in our reader.
- Some users upgrading from 1.5.5 or earlier hit a problem where the upgrader fails to copy the unpacked executable. Alas, this is a known problem in 1.5.5, which we have fixed in 2.0, but since the upgrader is built into 1.5.5 we couldn’t distribute a fix beforehand. We’ve updated the “update text” to tell users how to work around the problem— simply download SuperDuper! from my website, and install manually.
- Some RAID users found that their Apple RAID sets weren’t selectable in the source or destination pop-ups. Various calls at many levels of the OS return weird information for some of these RAID sets, and we’ve worked around the unexpected/incorrect values.
- Panther users with low-level disk errors were experiencing a failure when we retried the copy operation using different techniques. Basically, the operation will fail and they’ll see something about “_copyfile” in their log. Basically, copyfile doesn’t exist in the expected place under 10.3.x, and so we shouldn’t have used it.
- Users with symlinks in the path to their Home folder (such as FileVault users) got an error when a scheduled item tried to run. This is because Finder’s AppleScripting can’t get the container of an alias that has a symlink in it. News to us: fixed.
- The previously mentioned goof-up that gives the old price in one of the windows in the application. The price is $27.95—that window is wrong.
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!
05 Dec 2005 at 08:20 am | #
i sure agree! i think it rocks! thanks again for a great product.
04 Jan 2006 at 09:04 pm | #
"SuperDuper! was crashing for some users immediately on startup, or soon thereafter. We couldn’t reproduce that to save our lives, but thanks to a lot of helpful users, we finally determined that it had to do with large “crontab” files, and an off by one error in our reader.”
Yeah, see, sometimes you can’t reproduce problems and you need some helpful users. I’m sure the input they provided was far more helpful than had they just filed an incorrect bug report then started complaining on their blogs.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/slowly_going_insane_while_waiting_for_a_fix/#comments
doh.