Twenty years on a shelf

Dave Nanian designed what was meant to be SuperDuper 3.0 in 2007, decided the systems of the day couldn’t carry it, and put the notebook on a shelf for nearly twenty years. SuperDuper 4 is that design, finally built — a ground-up rewrite of a Mac backup tool that has been shipping for 22 years.

The parts he kept are as telling as the parts he replaced. What’s going to happen? is still there, still a plain-English sentence describing the copy before you run it, now configured by clicking the underlined phrases inside the sentence itself. Documents are gone, replaced by Copy Jobs organized by source. Preview runs the entire copy without writing anything and reports what would have changed. The app split into a helper and an interface, so backups run after you quit, and after you log out. Smart Updates got about twice as fast, and with the new Turbo path an 8-million-file, 2.5TB nightly run went from roughly 40 minutes to about one.

Twenty-two years of free updates ended here; SuperDuper 4 is the first paid upgrade, with the price adjusted for inflation since 2004. Making a full bootable backup is still free without a license, and Nanian still answers support mail for unregistered users. That combination — charge for the rewrite, keep the thing that protects your data free — is the shape of a tool built for the person who owns the machine.