SuperDuper! 4 Rewrites 22-Year-Old Backup Tool with Turbo Speed
SupererDuperer
After 22 years, Shirt Pocket has released SuperDuper! 4, a ground-up rewrite that modernizes the classic Mac backup tool. The new version replaces documents with Copy Jobs, adds inline configuration, and supports any file system the Mac can read. Smart Updates are up to 10x faster with the new Turbo feature—a 2.5TB backup that took 40 minutes now completes in about one. It also runs copies in the background, supports concurrent backups, and offers Shortcuts integration for automation. SuperDuper! 4 is a paid upgrade, free for recent purchases, with discounts for older customers.
With Turbo…it’s only about a **minute**. **One minute**.
- AnonC
I tried SuperDuper! long ago (yeah, the application’s name has an exclamation mark), but shifted to Carbon Copy Cloner as a paid user since the latter was advancing and keeping up much faster (with the Mac OS changes) and better than SuperDuper! seemed to.
But I like this new design in SuperDuper! 4.
I always wondered about the pricing and upgrades, but this is impressive:
> In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.
Talk about value for money for the end user!
> SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before, and as such, I’ve decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I’ve also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it’s still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today’s dollars.
The price to buy it as a new user is above the price that Carbon Copy Cloner charges (and that has paid upgrades at half the buying price every two or three years). But if this keeps up with Apple’s changes faster, it may be a bargain again. I’ll be trying this and probably buying this soon.
- vova_hn2
Apparently, "SuperDuper" is a backup tool for Mac OS. I would really appreciate the article mentioning it.
- JSR_FDED
This makes me really happy. Dave has kept the great things about SuperDuper (I especially love “what’s going to happen next” - wonder why other software doesn’t do this) and upgraded its abilities.
Backup sounds simple but it has 1000 edge cases, from idiosyncratic behavior of different drives, to filesystem-specific issues. To keep on top of that while each MacOS release brings its own changes and challenges is a Herculean task.
It means that when I occasionally do a backup I can benefit from all that knowledge and hard won experience. No “it worked with the other drive but not this one, maybe it’s the cable?” type issues. Easiest purchase decision ever.
- Syzygies
Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials.
They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUIDs, the sort of thing that never happens to anyone else). This matters even if you never need support: Their software is battle-tested by decades of user experience that they understand.
This leads to software convergence, which this rewrite furthers. At first SuperDuper! appeared to me to be oversimplified to avoid trouble at all costs, while Carbon Copy Cloner appeared to be a collection of enthusiast scripts. One could in fact find the scripts driving either; I expanded SuperDuper!'s scope by directly calling an internal script for years.
Decades ago I used Retrospect. They were arrogant twits but they supported external tape drives and such. My breaking point came when when my life turned bicoastal, and their time zone bug forced full backups after every flight. No MBA stereotype could prepare me for the stupid brushoff I heard at a MacWorld show over this. External drives had become affordable enough to motivate a switch to SuperDuper!
More recently there was a macOS release that put the category into crisis, and Carbon Copy Cloner figured it out first. I swit […]
- Meleagris
I was just working on backing up my mac yesterday. I talked to Fable about replacing Carbon Copy Cloner with a custom script.
One of the things I realized is that backups are about as “critical” a function as you can get in personal computing. I ultimately decided to stick with Carbon Copy Cloner because, in this case, it just made sense to use something battle-tested.
I’m happy the developer of SuperDuper got the chance to build the version he wanted to build. But from the outside, reading the blog on mobile, it’s hard to ignore that the website is broken and appears to have been generated with an LLM.
The fact that AI was used to create the website isn’t a problem in itself. It’s the lack of attention to detail in shipping the website broken. It makes me wonder about the state of the application itself.
In the case of SuperDuper 4. The application could be extremely well tested. But as a potential customer, I have no way of knowing that, and the presentation doesn’t inspire the confidence I’d want before handing it my backups.
Cases like this are where I really appreciate open source projects. Having the ability to look at the source directly gives me confidence. In this case, all I have to go off is a broken LLM generated website.