I tried SuperDuper! long ago (yeah, the application’s name has an exclamation mark), but shifted to Carbon Copy Cloner as a paid user since the latter was advancing and keeping up much faster (with the Mac OS changes) and better than SuperDuper! seemed to.
But I like this new design in SuperDuper! 4.
I always wondered about the pricing and upgrades, but this is impressive:
> In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.
Talk about value for money for the end user!
> SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before, and as such, I’ve decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I’ve also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it’s still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today’s dollars.
The price to buy it as a new user is above the price that Carbon Copy Cloner charges (and that has paid upgrades at half the buying price every two or three years). But if this keeps up with Apple’s changes faster, it may be a bargain again. I’ll be trying this and probably buying this soon.
JSR_FDED 2 hours ago [-]
This makes me really happy. Dave has kept the great things about SuperDuper (I especially love “what’s going to happen next” - wonder why other software doesn’t do this) and upgraded its abilities.
Backup sounds simple but it has 1000 edge cases, from idiosyncratic behavior of different drives, to filesystem-specific issues. To keep on top of that while each MacOS release brings its own changes and challenges is a Herculean task.
It means that when I occasionally do a backup I can benefit from all that knowledge and hard won experience. No “it worked with the other drive but not this one, maybe it’s the cable?” type issues. Easiest purchase decision ever.
vova_hn2 2 hours ago [-]
Apparently, "SuperDuper" is a backup tool for Mac OS. I would really appreciate the article mentioning it.
da_grift_shift 28 minutes ago [-]
No.
Then the article isn't for you. That's okay!
Not every piece of writing has to be delicately crafted to the sensibilities of The Hacker News Reader.
Just because someone parachutes it onto the frontpage one day doesn't change that.
But if you're still curious and you can't find the easily reachable homepage then that's on you.
selectively 2 hours ago [-]
It wasn't written for the HN crowd. Someone who is a 'tech person' and uses macOS would know what SuperDuper is.
40four 51 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been a Mac user since college and I’ve literally never heard of the product.
To your point, this is their blog page, not a marketing/landing page. Of course it assumes you already know what the product is.
I clicked to their actual landing page, and immediately figured out what it is! Problem solved!
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jhund 49 minutes ago [-]
Big shout out to SuperDuper! I bought it well over a decade ago and it’s just been working for countless updates and across many Mac devices and OS versions. I’ll definitely upgrade.
wduquette 48 minutes ago [-]
Me, too.
SanjayMehta 39 minutes ago [-]
SuperDuper! is one of those gems which I will happily pay to upgrade every release without a second thought.
1Password used to be in that list, as was Parallels before it, but they both switched to a subscription model, which is an immediate nope.
Pleasantly surprised that I qualified for a free upgrade here from 3 to 4. Good old shareware days come to mind, I miss those developers.
The site looks like every other Claudesite, the docs are Claudemade, and I imagine Claude did the v4 rewrite. There's already been one bugfix release, probably more to come if the super-smart LLM took shortcuts around arcane MacOS esoterica in the name of "optimization".
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.
Hmm, what could have allowed the sudden burst of productivity? /s
That said, we shouldn't assume that if he used an LLM we know what quality the finished product is.
For all we know, he used an LLM to get a working rough version, and then rewrote every method, bit by bit. For this sort of product - an decades-old app that can result in data loss and so the wrath of furious users - it is more likely the developer was prudent.
But I like this new design in SuperDuper! 4.
I always wondered about the pricing and upgrades, but this is impressive:
> In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.
Talk about value for money for the end user!
> SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before, and as such, I’ve decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I’ve also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it’s still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today’s dollars.
The price to buy it as a new user is above the price that Carbon Copy Cloner charges (and that has paid upgrades at half the buying price every two or three years). But if this keeps up with Apple’s changes faster, it may be a bargain again. I’ll be trying this and probably buying this soon.
Backup sounds simple but it has 1000 edge cases, from idiosyncratic behavior of different drives, to filesystem-specific issues. To keep on top of that while each MacOS release brings its own changes and challenges is a Herculean task.
It means that when I occasionally do a backup I can benefit from all that knowledge and hard won experience. No “it worked with the other drive but not this one, maybe it’s the cable?” type issues. Easiest purchase decision ever.
Then the article isn't for you. That's okay!
Not every piece of writing has to be delicately crafted to the sensibilities of The Hacker News Reader.
Just because someone parachutes it onto the frontpage one day doesn't change that.
But if you're still curious and you can't find the easily reachable homepage then that's on you.
To your point, this is their blog page, not a marketing/landing page. Of course it assumes you already know what the product is.
I clicked to their actual landing page, and immediately figured out what it is! Problem solved!
1Password used to be in that list, as was Parallels before it, but they both switched to a subscription model, which is an immediate nope.
Pleasantly surprised that I qualified for a free upgrade here from 3 to 4. Good old shareware days come to mind, I miss those developers.
From this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260131221257/https://www.shirt...
to this:
https://www.shirtpocket.com/classic.php
The site looks like every other Claudesite, the docs are Claudemade, and I imagine Claude did the v4 rewrite. There's already been one bugfix release, probably more to come if the super-smart LLM took shortcuts around arcane MacOS esoterica in the name of "optimization".
https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/dog_dazed
That said, we shouldn't assume that if he used an LLM we know what quality the finished product is.
For all we know, he used an LLM to get a working rough version, and then rewrote every method, bit by bit. For this sort of product - an decades-old app that can result in data loss and so the wrath of furious users - it is more likely the developer was prudent.