SuperDuper! 4

SuperDuper! 4.0.2 (August 10, 2026)

Hark! What is that I hear, just over the hillock? It is a horn, blown to announce a second quick follow-up to 4.0.0, this time dealing with a SoftRAID regression and some compatibility issues and/or my incompetence. You decide!

Fixes

SoftRAID volumes back up again. SuperDuper’s identity checking didn’t recognize a SoftRAID volume it had to mount itself mid-run, and refused to copy with a “Couldn’t walk diskN to a partition slice” error. It now recognizes those volumes properly—and, while we were in there, checks their identity even more carefully than before.

Have I mentioned that SoftRAID volumes are weird? Because they are.

Paragon NTFS volumes can be copied. For some reason, Paragon advertises that they support enabling ownership, but then gives an error when you try. SuperDuper now works around that.

APM drives supported. Apple Partition Map has been effectively deprecated for quite a while, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have supported it, so now I do.

The Send Email shortcut no longer crashes Shortcuts on some systems. I dunno, man. Sometimes, I wonder if Shortcuts is all that.

An unfortunate side-effect is that its security prompts are even more obnoxious than before. You’re…welcome?

Non-startup drives can’t be the source for a bootable copy. If you picked a bootable backup—rather than the disk you actually started up from—as the source of an “Erase, then copy,” the copy failed with an error. The replicator will only make a bootable copy of the startup volume, and SuperDuper now reflects that by not allowing the choice (and explaining why).

A backup that couldn’t be re-encrypted gives an error. If SuperDuper erased an encrypted destination and then couldn’t turn encryption back on, the next copy saw an ordinary unencrypted drive and carried on as if you’d never encrypted it. It now stops instead of writing your data to a drive you thought was encrypted.

Broken Copy Rules fail early. SuperDuper! now checks that a job’s Copy Rules load properly before it starts the copy. Previously, an “Erase, then copy” didn’t discover a broken rule until after the erase—so the copy failed and the destination was left empty. Now it refuses up front and the destination isn’t touched.

A Copy Rule can no longer include itself. If you built a new Copy Rule on top of an existing one and then saved it under that same name, the new rule replaced the old one and ended up including itself—and every backup that used it failed with a “couldn’t be loaded” error. SuperDuper! now catches this when you save (or rename) and asks for a different name instead. If one of your rules is already in this state, deleting it in the editor brings the original back.

Yes, that’s as weird as it sounds. But it’s fixed.

Custom Copy Rule “No Files” fix. Starting with “no files” took its job a little too seriously, and overrode everything that followed. This would only affect newly created rules that explicitly picked No files as the Starts With value.

Copy Rules keep what you asked them to keep. If a rule said to keep a folder, a broader rule somewhere else in the list could override it. This matters most for rules you built on top of included rules: the keeps inside those could never win before, no matter how specific they were.

Changing a Copy Rule no longer leaves files out. In two cases, editing your rules changed what should be copied, but the next backup didn’t go back and look—so files that had just become eligible were quietly skipped until something else forced a full scan. Both now check to see if they need to.

The Copy Rules preview matches the copy. The preview and the real copy could disagree—it might show a folder as kept when the copy would remove it, or show something as copied when it wouldn’t be.

Network backups succeed more often. Various NAS implementations, types, and connections behave in…let’s say…curious ways. v4.0.2 tries to work around many of these behavioral “quirks”.

However, I strongly discourage use of AFP. I’ve seen all sorts of crazy behavior with the various AFP implementations, especially around symlinks, that are just going to make you sad and/or mad.

In case this all isn’t clear, let me state it plainly: Use SMB.

Improvements

Copy Newer is faster. It only needs to compare types and dates, so it no longer asks the system for ownership and permission details on every single file it looks at.

Cancel works while a copy is waiting on the system. Cancelling used to sit there until whatever SuperDuper! was waiting on (like a drive that gets stuck mounting) finished on its own.

A ghost destination no longer lingers after an erase. Erasing a destination could leave its previous identity in the destination list as a second, pickable choice.

The schedule window expands dynamically on macOS 14. Before it…didn't.

Send Diagnostics in Help menu. I’ve added a way to easily send in reports that aren’t job-specific to the Help menu.

Requirements

The same as before: macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.