SuperDuper! 4
The backup app Mac users have sworn by for over 22 years—brand new from tip to tail. Easier to use, 2x+ faster copies, incredible capabilities, and much more flexible. It's everything you've ever wished SuperDuper could do, and even better than you've heard.
If you thought Smart Update was fast before, it's been turbocharged in version 4. Now, subsequent backups can take less than a minute!
We'll set things up for boot success, Apple willing.
SSD drives (not thumb drives or cards) work best. Your backup does not have to be bootable to be restorable.
Schedule copies to happen when it's convenient for you, as many as you'd like. They'll run whether SuperDuper is open or not...even if you're not logged in!
Read it. Click it. Choose it. Done.
Every copy starts with a plain-English sentence. Underlined words are the settings—change one and the sentence updates to reflect your selection.
Everything you loved, but better.
It's the same SuperDuper you know, rebuilt on the latest Apple technologies—with a modern, blazingly fast copy engine shaped by more than 20 years of experience.
Configure copies by clicking words in a sentence—all in one place. Drag and drop folders for the source or destination!
Your copy status updates in real time, even as you do other things. Run several copies at once—the sky's the limit!
Smart Update is faster than ever, and when it's Turbocharged...watch out! Your backup may finish before you're done clicking the Copy Now button!
Copies run and report whether the application is open or not. A convenient menu extra shows how many are in progress, and clicking it shows a summary.
An on-device Apple Intelligence summary tells you what happened—and the new What happened? section tells you what to do if it failed.
SuperDuper 4 will tell you how much time it will take for your copy to finish and when all current copies will be done.
Pick the drives, pick the time, and forget about it. SuperDuper wakes the Mac if it needs to.
When a copy is done, the results are summarized so it's easy to see what was copied—and how fast it went!
What's new
Live from the Sparkle appcastSuperDuper! 4.0.6 (September 14, 2026)
SuperDuper 4.0.6 is (once again) mostly about disk images: dealing with them when they’re already open; allowing erase; scaling band size to try to keep them fast.
Oh yeah, also “final” support for Golden Gate.1
Running-only filter
Click the n copies running pill to filter to just those jobs. If you have a lot of copy jobs for a given source, you can filter the list with a click.
Disk images
New disk images should be faster. A sparsebundle stores your backup as thousands of small “band” files, and the size of those bands is fixed when the image is created. The default size doesn’t grow with the image, so a large backup could end up with an enormous number of tiny files—an 8 TB destination could reach nearly a million of them. (Why is this the default when the size is known at create time? You’ll have to ask Apple.) SuperDuper now picks a band size that suits the image’s size, balancing the number of bands with their size.
Note This applies to new images in 4.0.6 and later. If you have a large one and it feels slow to erase, you may want to recreate it. (You can change the band size with hdiutil, but it copies the whole thing over…impractical in most cases.)
An already-mounted image now works if you’ve selected it by filename. Not much else to say about that.
Erase, then copy is available for disk images. Again, not much to say: erase away!
Note I still don’t allow OS replication to an image…there’s basically no point.
Dropping a mounted image’s volume on a job now binds the image file. That’s what you want, so SuperDuper figures it out and does it for you.
Copying a disk image into itself has a better error message. But really, don’t do that, eh?
You can use an image as a source. It gave an error before. It no longer does. Better than that, it works.
Timeouts have been adjusted to deal with large images and slow hosts. A big image on a NAS can take a really long time, so SuperDuper is now exceptionally patient.
Copying
A copy no longer (intermittently) fails on a drive that’s already mounted. macOS mounts a volume the moment it appears, and if SuperDuper asked at the same instant, the system reported a conflict that we read as “not mounted”. No longer!
CoreSpotlight mess less messy. CoreSpotlight folders are very busy on recent macOS versions, and can be in invalid states when copied. SuperDuper is now more tolerant of this kind of temporary corruption.
OS changes to the destination mid-copy are now tolerated. The OS can sometimes whack things SuperDuper is writing, while it’s writing. Those situations are now retried rather than flagged as errors.
Improved copying into cloud folders. FileProvider-managed folders, used as destinations, now tolerate provider EA changes (I’m looking at you, Dropbox).
Password Prompting
Overprompting fixed. There were situations with locked volumes where, even though SuperDuper had successfully unlocked a volume, it re-prompted for the password.
Rules
Deletion improved. When an open rule is deleted, I now tell you how many jobs reference that rule. If you elect to delete the rule, the rule editing window is closed. Any jobs that reference that rule show its name in red and cannot be run until a different rule is selected.
Microtastic speed improvement. A small but meaningful improvement was made to rule evaluation speed. You won’t notice. But isn’t it nice to know it’s 51% faster, even so? More than half a microsecond! Woo!
Integration
There’s now a third-party application, Open Backup, that can notify mobile devices (iPhone and Android) when backups run.
Golden Gate
We’ve supported Golden Gate through its development, and I have to assume we’re running the RC, since it’s coming out today, September 14th.
That means we’re almost fully compatible with Golden Gate.
Or rather, we’re fully compatible, but Apple itself has had a regression.
Drives that have been properly replicated by Apple’s own tool—the only way to do it—are not showing up as startup drive choices.
When this started happening mid-Golden Gate development, we reported it to Apple (FB24210103, Apple friends), and hope they’ll address the issue in a follow-on update.2
Note You can get the copy to boot by reducing boot security and running
blessin a Terminal session in Recovery, with—setBoot, but, really, don’t do this unless you really have to.
Really.
Remember: you do not need to be able to to boot from a backup to restore from it.
And when Apple does fix the problem, boot will just start working again, with no need to update SuperDuper.
Requirements
The same as before: macOS 14 or later, including macOS 27 (Golden Gate) on Apple silicon or Intel.
Apple silicon or Intel
An external drive for the copy (SSD recommended for bootability)
Full Disk Access (guided setup)
The SuperDuper 4 FAQ covers bootability, APFS, snapshots, scheduling, and the move from Copy Scripts to Copy Rules.
Read the SuperDuper 4 FAQ → Open the User's Guide →Back up like a hero tonight.
Free to try for full, erase backups. Buy when you're ready to unlock real speed and power.