SuperDuper! 4

SuperDuper! 4.0.4 (August 25, 2026)

SuperDuper 4.0.4 has a few fixes, but mostly re-introduces image backups.

And so, to the fixes!

Image backups

You can back up to a disk image again. Point a job at a sparsebundle on a NAS, a share, or a plain external drive, and SuperDuper copies into the real APFS volume inside the image rather than onto the network volume itself.

Why bother? Speed and accuracy, when they’re needed.

The volume inside an image is real APFS, mounted locally. It keeps everything. It has an identity. Incremental copies work, and ⚡️Turbo works, so subsequent runs are much faster.

SuperDuper now offers to make one for you. Wherever it warns that a destination can't be faithful, there's now a button to switch to an image. It sizes the image to the source volume and automatically names it appropriately.

Yes, you can override the name.

Existing images work too. Just drag it onto a job.

Encrypted images are supported. Check the box when you create an image and SuperDuper asks for a password, stores it in your login keychain, and uses it from then on—including for scheduled copies while you're asleep. Or napping. Or just away from your Mac.

It cleans up after itself. SuperDuper connects to the server if it isn't mounted, opens the image, copies, closes the image, and puts the server back the way it found it. (If it didn't mount something, it doesn't unmount it.)

Fixes

Run on connect no longer auto-ejects…unexpectedly. With "Run when connected" on an encrypted external, plugging it in started the copy, but when done, ejected. No longer!

Clicking in a job's title accepted the rename instead of placing the cursor. You couldn't put the caret anywhere with the mouse, and you couldn't select. (Duh. Sorry.)

A finished backup could be reported as "aborted". It wasn't. It finished.

Stop can take a while when SuperDuper is waiting on you. If a copy was paused waiting for a password or a server, Stop now ends immediately — and doesn’t report that as a failure.

One unreachable NAS could stall every other drive. A share that had gone away would hold everything else up while we waited for it to answer. Each one now stands on its own.

Dragging a drive or a disk image onto a job treated it as a plain folder. It's now identified for what it is, the same way a paste always was.

An unmounted drive is not a disconnected one. SuperDuper was conflating the two, which made perfectly available destinations look missing.

An unplugged drive asked you to re-pick it. After a restart, an update, or a reboot, a job whose drive wasn't attached said its destination couldn't be verified and asked you to choose it again—when nothing was wrong and the drive just wasn't there. It now says to connect the drive, and only asks you to re-pick when the drive is present but the volume it was pointed at is gone.

A destination with room to spare could be called too small. When the source volume shared its APFS container with other volumes, SuperDuper sized the copy by the whole container instead of the volume you picked—so a 66GB volume sitting beside a 1.5TB neighbor was measured as 2.1TB. Both ends of that comparison now measure the actual volume.

Improvements

Apple Intelligence is now a little intelligencier. It could describe a disk image as a drive, split a destination's name in half, and (my personal favorite) print a phrase out of its own instructions as if it were the name of your backup drive. Yay!

Summaries now name the source and destination correctly, in bold, or we bail on its output.

Failures stop whining about hardware that's fine. A copy that stalled on a single slow file could be explained as "a failing drive", complete with an invented duration to back it up. Intelligence! Woo!

"Once copying is unlocked" is now something you can click. It told you why your scheduled copies were paused and then left you to go find the padlock yourself. It's a link, and it unlocks.

Preview predicts the real copy more closely. It takes the same snapshot of the source that a real run does, so what it tells you is what you'll get.

My Swift UI learning process continues. The window invalidates/redraws less often, uses significantly less CPU, and is more responsive.

Requirements

The same as before: macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.

SuperDuper! 4.0.3 (August 17, 2026)

Welcome to the hat-trick release of v4.0—v4.0.3…the goal of which is to continue to address any roll-out problems as quickly as possible.

And so, to the fixes!

Fixes

**Copying from an non-startup bootable copy can now Turbo**, whereas before it could not.

Spotlight restoration is more reliable post-replication. This is mostly due to trying to restore both the overall state of indexing and individually ignored files and folders. It’s better.

Dragging a job to reorder it didn’t work. Regression—fixed.

Clicking to open a pop-up, and then using the keyboard, didn’t work. Click open the copy-method (or any other) picker and the arrow keys and Esc did nothing (they worked with you opened with the keyboard). Arrows, Space, Return and Esc now work no matter how you opened it.

Chapter 1,000,000 in the Swift UI Hates the Keyboard saga, with more to come. Might even be a trilogy!

A backup could fail mid-copy if another app yoinked our snapshot. If something (I’m looking at you, Time Machine) unmounted the copy’s internal snapshot while a backup was running (a snapshot Time Machine did not own, natch), which would show up later as an error. SuperDuper now notices the moment it happens, stops cleanly, and the failure report names what actually went wrong...and who did it.

And we know who did it.

A bootable copy could fail at the very last step. While I was renaming the volumes back to what they should be, the system would sometimes unmount them to do its own stuff. Rude!

A backup could start, and then just…sit there. I’ve only seen this with one user, who ran a huge from-scratch-not-a-replication copy, and then a follow-up Smart Update. Basically, this exposed a weird macOS bug: when I was waiting for an answer to a Turbo-related query, that answer never came.

Well, I don’t wait indefinitely any more. If macOS doesn’t answer in a reasonable amount of time, SuperDuper gives up and just does a regular Smart Update. Take that, permanent wait-state.

Improvements

Turbo will happen more, and faster. I’ve tweaked the way the system inquiries and accounting are done, for the better.

Running a lot of replications at once could stall the UI. Yeah, none of you did this, but I did.

Smart Delete improvements. Should work more quickly and accurately to free space, if available.

Extremely large folder handling is improved. Pathological case, meet Dr. Improvement.

Groundwork for VoiceOver. Drive lists, pickers, and job tiles now describe themselves properly instead of reading as scattered fragments, and decorative artwork keeps quiet. This is in-progress—there’s more to do before it’s something we’d call supported—but it should already be noticeably better, and we’d welcome reports from VoiceOver users.

Requirements

The same as before: macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.