For the Executive Set
SuperDuper v4.0.2 is now available, both in-app and as a direct download.
It has “Bug fixes and performance improvements”.
For Those With a Bit More Patience
Doing this kind of work requires patience, focus, and care. And recognition that no matter how carefully you test, no matter how many configurations you put in your test suite, no matter how diligent your external testers, something always gets through.
Nothing bad, knock wood. But something.
And so, as the number of unusual configurations pop up, so do the unusual edge cases. The flaky drives, weird NAS devices, software environments that interfere with basic operations, etc.
This, for the most part, is a collection of fixes for those unusual things that you just don’t know about until you see them, and can’t really anticipate fully.
Exhaustive / Exhausting
Rather than restate the release notes here, I thought I’d focus on a couple of the more interesting cases.
Rules of the Game
Copy Rules look simple—a couple of operation types, some basic patterns. But interaction between the various elements is highly complex, and part of the challenge is ensuring that you follow the intentions of what the rule is doing.
As an example, consider a rule that is designed to tag some files or folders as “optional”—that is, files that could potentially generate errors during a copy, but since they’re inessential, those errors should be ignored.
Well, if you have that rule, and then later say “exclude all files”, should the rule be applied? What about a rule that preserves a specific folder in your Home folder, followed by a rule that excludes top level folders and then includes all of Users. Should the folder be preserved?
Anyway, stuff like that can drive you insane. v4.0.2 has various fixes in these areas that limit trips to the “it’s doing what?” asylum.
Ghosts
There’s an enormous amount of code that goes into maintaining volume identity, the sidebar, the job selections, etc.
As you might expect, it’s critical that this be right. You don’t want to end up accidentally targeting the wrong drive, or changing the user’s selection.
The balance between “safe re-selection” and “prompt for missing drives” is a delicate one, and it’s better to be a little too strict than not strict enough.
This is especially challenging when drives mutate in extensive ways, like when a single volume turns into a volume group and separate System and Data volumes, plus a series of support volumes. Put a bunch of those side-by-side in a container and, well, it’s a lot. I would not be exaggerating to say that just making crazy stuff going on behind the scenes look semi-normal “live” has taken months of tweaking.
Even with that, there were some situations like this that caused “ghost volumes” to appear in the sidebar. Those have been fixed.
Ye Olden Days
You’d think, given how long I’ve been doing this, that I would have covered Apple Partition Map. You’d be wrong. I fixed it, and have ashame.
NASty
Various NASen have unusual behaviors when dealing with file structures that aren’t necessarily native, and don’t all deal well with very rapid I/O. I had already implemented some heuristics that ramped our write speeds up and down depending on how well the network connection was handling it, and this version adjusts that behavior further to accommodate the specific performance characteristics and failures experienced during the copy session.
In addition to this, most AFP implementations out there are, well, quite defective. If you can connect with SMB, and plan to write to networks with SuperDuper, please do so.
And the Like
You get the idea. The margins have been aligned, some rough edges sanded down. Complete details are in the release notes.
You can update either in-app or by downloading directly.