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Comments (25)

• 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.
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  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.
• 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.
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  vova_hn2
  Apparently, "SuperDuper" is a backup tool for Mac OS. I would really appreciate the article mentioning it.
• jwr
  I have been using SuperDuper for the last 20 years.It works. It does its job. It doesn't pester me with popups. It didn't get bloated. It didn't get rewritten using Electron to support New Enterprise Features. It didn't get a built-in sync client for my pictures and videos so that I can share them with my team. It didn't get ads. It didn't get enshittified in any of the hundreds of possible ways that other apps did.I find it ridiculous that all I paid for this experience was… $27.95 back in 2006 (I just checked the receipt). That's $1.40/year. I have no idea how Dave can make a living this way, and if he ever introduces subscription pricing, I'll be happy to subscribe (cue the HN hater crowd with their knee-jerk reaction "subscriptions BAD!" and downvotes).If you don't like the enshittification of everything around you, support software that doesn't do that.Thank you for the fantastic app, Dave. I will happily pay for the upgrade and will happily keep paying, because good apps are worth paying for!
• Retr0id
  The "what's going to happen" in the example screenshot seems self-contradictory. The first paragraph says it'll exclude certain files and directories, while the second says it's a block-level copy with no exclusions. Which is it?
• yzydserd
  Bought this in April 2005 for £11.95 and 58p per year is good value. Not sure I'll upgrade though.
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  jhund
  Big shout out to SuperDuper! I bought it well over a decade ago and it’s just been working for countless updates and across many Mac devices and OS versions. I’ll definitely upgrade.
• Kon5ole
  I have no idea if this was LLM assisted or not, but it fits my expectation of what will happen when skilled developers start using agents effectively.All kinds of software big and small should see a very noticeable increase in activity.Sometimes slop, for sure, and sometimes people with the wrong incentives call the shots. That's the bad scenario and we've all seen that already.But when controlled by skilled developers (who actually care) it should lead to more features, less bugs, better security, documentation that's up to date in several languages and so on.Everything from MacOS, Windows and Linux to small tools that have existed for decades should improve faster than ever. From what I understand we got the largest security patches in the history of Windows, macOS and iOS this summer. That's another sign.
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  mayoff
  I started using SuperDuper user in 2005 and was happy with it for a decade. Then one day in 2015 or 2016 it stopped working, and upon investigating, I discovered it used AppleScript under the covers. Even though I'd written AppleScript occasionally, it is such an obtuse programming system that I wasn't willing to spend any time trying to debug SuperDuper's script. And while I suspect David Nanian provides excellent support, I figured giving Carbon Copy Cloner a try would be faster and easier, and I've been using CCC ever since.
• SanjayMehta
  SuperDuper! is one of those gems which I will happily pay to upgrade every release without a second thought.1Password used to be in that list, as was Parallels before it, but they both switched to a subscription model, which is an immediate nope.Pleasantly surprised that I qualified for a free upgrade here from 3 to 4. Good old shareware days come to mind, I miss those developers.
• huflungdung
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  da_grift_shift
  Yikes.From this:https://web.archive.org/web/20260131221257/https://www.shirt...to this:https://www.shirtpocket.com/classic.phpThe site looks like every other Claudesite, the docs are Claudemade, and I imagine Claude did the v4 rewrite. There's already been one bugfix release, probably more to come if the super-smart LLM took shortcuts around arcane MacOS esoterica in the name of "optimization".https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/dog_dazed