SupererDuperer — Shirt Pocket Watch

Shirt Pocket

SuperDuper! 4ClassicBlog Support<br>Download

← Shirt Pocket Watch

Latest<br>Archives<br>Categories<br>RSS

Search the blog

Search

August 1, 2026<br>News<br>Personal<br>Shirt Pocket<br>SuperDuper!

SupererDuperer

Executive Summary

Brand new, top-to-bottom rewrite of SuperDuper now available.

All the Details

22 years.

SuperDuper has had an impressive run. It has lasted, in its original form, for longer than any other product I’ve ever been involved with over the (so far) 43 years of my working career. Somehow, Shirt Pocket—and SuperDuper—has been more than half of that.<br>Over those years, most of the design decisions made way back in 2004 have proven to withstand the test of time:

The text-based What’s going to happen? section;

The status view that clearly shows the process that’s taking place during the copy, ticking off the steps as it goes along;

The minimal number of options that let you stay focused on the task at hand.

At the same time, some choices constrained what the program could do:

It was document-based, which made sense at the time, but wasn’t really how users thought about the process;

Scheduling was a bit of a bolt-on (and suffered from a disastrous initial usability test before release), driving the interface through scripting (RIP AppleScript, hello direct event dispatch from Swift) and isolating its details in a separate window, divorced from the source;

Copy failures, while rare, basically gave a "whoops" and asked users to examine a log filled with technical details of the error;

Only "native" Apple file systems were supported (HFS+ and APFS);

And some concepts, like the Sandbox—great in the days of macOS before the Sealed System Volume—were rendered obsolete, sent to the land of wind and ghosts by Apple’s relentless forward march.

I could go on: products are a combination of good and bad, of success and failure, and I learned to live with the (mostly good!) balance.

Dreams Become Reality

Back in 2007, I designed what was intended to be SuperDuper v3.0. It was a rewrite that greatly expanded its capabilities while retaining its essence.

But, in those days, it just wasn’t possible for us to implement those grand plans. The new UI was much more complex, the logic more elaborate, and the systems we had then didn’t support the things needed to make it a reality without a lot of complex coding we didn’t have time for.

On top of that, macOS itself was a moving target (and still is!): adding and deprecating features; completely changing the file system; locking down the OS; supporting not just one change in CPU, but three .

With a tool so tied to how the system operated at a low level, it was a lot of work just keeping up with what Apple was doing.

So, I put the notebook with that design in it on a shelf.

For nearly 20 years.

Today, I’m happy to say that I’ve finally been able to carve out enough time to grab that "old" redesign, flesh it out further, modernize it, and make that dream a reality.

Welcome to SuperDuper! 4

The new version of SuperDuper is a ground-up rewrite, a tip-to-tail reinvention of what SuperDuper looks like, how it works, what it can do, and where I can take it in the future.

The new version feels different, yet familiar. The successful elements of SuperDuper’s design, like What’s going to happen? and the status view, are still there, but they’ve been refreshed and modernized.

Documents have been retired and replaced with Copy Jobs , which are stored internally and organized by source. If you want to copy Macintosh HD, that’s where you start. Click, and you’re presented with one or more template copy operations, or you can start from scratch.

Configuration is done right inline by clicking bold, underlined link elements and selecting options from pop-ups. The effect of your choices is immediately reflected in What’s going to happen? , ensuring you know what to expect when you click Copy Now.

Preview

And if you’re still unsure, you can safely see what’s going to happen…for real . Click the Preview button and SuperDuper will run the copy without making changes and present you with a report that shows exactly what would have been updated, added, deleted, etc., had this been a real run.

Blazing Speed!

Once you decide it’s time to make the copy, SuperDuper 4 is much faster than before. And I’m not just talking 20% or 30% faster. Smart Updates are between 2x and, with the new Turbo feature, an order of magnitude faster.

As an example, my typical nightly Smart Update, of an 8-million-file volume, about 2.5TB of data, used to take around 40 minutes to run.

Without Turbo, it now takes about 20 minutes. But with Turbo…it’s only about a minute .

One minute . OK, yes , sticklers—that’s actually quite a bit more than an order of magnitude. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

History

Successful and failed runs are shown at the bottom of the copy job, with color-coded dots that can be clicked to display details.

If scheduled, a clear indication of...