Those of you who follow me on Twitter (I'm @dnanian) may have read that we were slightly surprised by Yosemite's release, which came out a week earlier than we expected. Fortunately, we were ready with a compatible, tested version—but it wasn't as optimized as we wanted it to be.
Basically, we knew we had reliable and safe copies of Yosemite, but there were cases where our change detection was too conservative, and thus we were copying too much.
In some cases (for users of the f-secure antivirus program, for example), we'd end up copying some files every time they ran, even when Smart Update was used, due to f-secure's crazy use of Extended Attributes to mark files as "clean".
We also found a case where some of the data in the file was being compared when it didn't need to be. This was, of course, "safe", but it was also sub-optimal (and obviously wrong).
I'm happy to say that we've spent much of the last month completing the additional work we wanted to finish, as well as polishing and improving 2.7.3 based on the feedback we've received from users.
Not only have we fixed the cases where extra or unnecessary copying was done, we've made significant improvements across the board: copying is faster than ever; some longstanding (though minor) UI issues were fixed; we've even radically reworked the way we ask the system for the list of attached volumes, which should eliminate the delay some users experienced when launching and completing copies.
We've even fixed the animation bug that caused the update notice to not fully display for some users. Unfortunately, since the code that displays the update is in the "current" version, not the "new" version, some of you are going to see the problem again with this update (and I'll be getting thousands of emails about it). Future update notices should display correctly (except in one case, hence the Bullwinkle reference in the release notes)!
Finally, we've added specific support for Backblaze's ".bzvol" folder, which is now not copied during regular backups (as recommended by Backblaze), and any existing .bzvol folders on a destination are preserved during Smart Update.
All in all, I think you're going to really like v2.7.4.
As always, thanks for using, recommending (and hopefully registering) SuperDuper!
