Purpose & Intent
SuperDuper is, obviously, a serious tool that has an important task: making a reliable copy of data from one place to another. Its UI, for the most part, is all business, and tries to make the process as clear as possible.
Those, clearly, are the big things. Table stakes, as it were.
Fun & Frivolity
Keeping that in mind, I’ve still tried to put “pleasing” things into the general design, with a focus on making things a bit more convenient, clear, informative, or easier to look at.
Things like animations and transitions (which were in SuperDuper Classic, too); updating progress with different options, communication via both bars and pulsing; more playful ways of choosing options; dragging around jobs; the sparkles to draw your attention for the first time1; things like that.
But, yeah—while I don’t want it to be boring, SuperDuper isn’t ever going to be a Delicious Generation app.2 Respect to whose who can be that playful with their stuff, though!
Fit & Finish
There are serious “little” things, too, of course. And that’s where I generally focus.
For example, SuperDuper preserves the destination drive icon and Spotlight state even across erase operations and replications.
It’s a little thing, but I know that many users identify their drives by their icons, and so it’s nearly as important as keeping the name the same.
Similarly, even though the Spotlight state is kept on the destination drive, I take pains to ensure that it’s preserved across the various copy permutations. It’s pretty annoying when Spotlight starts indexing a backup you told it to ignore…and can result in finding something on a backup rather than a source.
Behavioral things, too, like mounting drives for the user, and unmounting them after (if they started that way)…there are a lot of little touches in there that just try to predict what a user would want, without needing any settings, or thought…it just works.
Details & Obscurity
SuperDuper 4.0.8, released today, deals with some of those cases, and handles some relatively obscure cases better than before.
For example, users who have Samba setups on Linux boxes that include the fruit extensions may be preserving macOS permissions, and you can get into situations where a file with no permissions becomes permanently read-only (except server-side).
Obscure, but handled.
Speaking of obscure, the onboarding sequence is now sensitive to the macOS version you’re running, and name-checks the background activity section based differently depending on what it is. Because it regressed from macOS 14/15’s “Allow in the background” to macOS 26/27’s “Background App Activity” for reasons.
There’s a lot more, but you get the idea: continue to polish-polish-polish.
And to get the benefit of that
and install (or, better, use the built-in updater).
As always, enjoy, and thanks for using SuperDuper.
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Eventually, I’ll get around to my original plan for this—having the “Hi!” hand come alive, swoop down, and point at the link, along with some other fun behaviors…the storyboard I did for this amuses me…but it’s a lot of work for a funny-but-useful bit of goofiness.
Maybe if I do it they’ll let me into the Hall of Delicious Generations. ↩︎
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The original version of Apple’s
Time Machinehad its UI designed by Mike Matas, the original—and probably the best—Delicious Generation designer. I was lucky enough to have him design the original SuperDuper Classic icon back when he was a very young man, and it was quite clear he was both incredibly talented and going places.And, indeed, he did (many times over)!
Since he left, Time Machine has become less fun, and certainly less H.G. Wells/Victorian. ↩︎