Excuse the brevity of this post, but—as you might expect with a new update–things are kind of busy around these parts.

The update's gone well, except for some bandwidth issues we had to deal with, and some MySQL issues on my server that happened due to some issues with the way FogBUGZ handles large attachments (really, really crappily, typically crashing MySQL after eating huge amounts of memory). But, apart from continued delays for outbound mail due to volume, it's good.

But, as I said a number of posts ago, the only thing I can promise about a big update like this one is that there'll be a few problems. They're not affecting many people, but to summarize:

  • Some users are reporting that the status display stops updating in the middle of the copy. The backup does actually complete eventually, but the progress bar doesn't move, and the file counts stop.

    We're not quite sure what's going on here: it's not something we've been able to reproduce at this end. But we're looking into it. If you're experiencing this issue, drop a note to support.

  • The updater has been giving the occasional problem. This is frustrating, because we know of some problems there and have tried to "pre-emptively" handle the problem with the update notice, which indicates that you should download the update manually if you experience a problem.

    Unfortunately, that hasn't been clear to people, resulting in a huge volume of incoming mail (we're talking thousands in the past few days)... so sorry for the delays in responding.

  • 10.2/10.3 users were being offered the 2.5 update. Due to an error in the update description XML, 10.2/10.3 users were being offered the update, even though it wasn't compatible with their systems. The XML has been corrected, so that shouldn't happen any more.

  • Some users are having problems starting up from their copies. On some systems, copies start up but then programs immediately begin crashing. This is corrected by re-prebinding the copy, but given the way Leopard works this shouldn't be necessary. We're hoping this is a Leopard bug that'll be corrected in an update of OS X, but we're investigating it here, too.

  • Users with AntiVirus programs are having the occasional problem. This is kind of expected, given the way that AntiVirus programs work. In general, we suggest that you configure your AntiVirus application so that it ignores the backup volume.

    That said, if the AntiVirus program is on, an incorrect result code returned from a system call is indicating a file that vanishes between two points of execution is a folder, when it's not, and that's causing a weird "(null)" error that repeats a large number of times in the log. We're implementing a workaround for this case in our copy engine.

    Note that if you get a "permission denied" type of error and you're running AntiVirus, you should configure your AntiVirus program to not scan the backup volume, or turn off its "auto protect" feature while you're backing up.

  • Already mounted images, or images with special characters in their filename, cause an error. Due to a regression (caused by an attempt to workaround another bug), SD! fails if a sparse image we're supposed to copy to is already mounted. We also fail if the image has "special" characters (such as a quote) in it. We're working on a fix for this.

  • Networked Time Machine backups, on the same volume as local Time Machine backups, aren't preserved. If you're using the same volume for "networked" and "local" Time Machine backups, and you try to store a SuperDuper! backup directly to the same volume, we preserve the "local" backups but not the "network" ones. (That's a mouthful, sorry.)

    We're working on a fix for this as well.

  • Custom copy scripts that used "Exclude spotlight files" are failing. This script is no longer needed, so users who have included it should modify their copy scripts to remove the reference.

I think that's about it. There's nothing terribly major in there, fortunately, and we're working on getting the problems corrected as quickly as we can.

Thanks to everyone who's reported problems, and also to the vast majority of people who haven't encountered any!