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.
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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.
SuperDuper has been around for 22 years, and I’ve been using it since version 2 in 2006. Shirt Pocket had always been great about keeping the copy engine up-to-date with all the changes in macOS and its increasingly baroque file system structures. But the outward appearance of the app hadn’t changed much, aside from losing the brushed metal, and neither had the feature set. I know all too well how much work it can be as a solo developer just to keep an app working. Ironically, the better you are at adapting to the changing OS, hiding the complexity, and presenting a simple interface, the more it looks like you aren’t doing much. Actually, if you follow Nanian’s blog, you can see a fraction of all the stuff going on under the hood—tricky edge cases, macOS bugs, and undocumented behaviors that must be handled so that you can essentially just press a button and get a proper bootable backup.
Eventually, he found the time to rewrite the app, both the engine (which is faster and more robust) and the user interface (which is greatly expanded). My first reaction was: this is SwiftUI, isn’t it? And it is. You can just tell by the way the text reflows, all the different colored buttons and blobs, the hover effects, and how the design heavily emphasizes scrolling. (Like System Settings, it doesn’t remember scroll positions. Nor does it remember which disclosure triangles are expanded.) The keyboard navigation and focus behavior are off in places. For reasons I don’t understand, SwiftUI gets a lot of this wrong out of the box. In some cases, like the outline view for creating a copy rule, keyboard support was manually added and works as expected. But there are other places where arrow keys and type-selection don’t work. Sometimes I need extra clicks to get the proper focus. Sometimes the arrow keys scroll the window instead of changing the selection.
That said, this is one of the best SwiftUI interfaces I’ve seen. I think it successfully preserves the spirit of the app, making it really easy to configure things and see what’s going to happen, while streamlining the way documents/jobs are managed and expanding what you can do. It’s still essentially one window (plus a Settings with one checkbox), and you can still use it in the old way, but now you can also run multiple jobs at once and inspect their histories.
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.
This is great to have. If there are particular folders or files you want to check, you can browse the source tab of the preview to see what’s excluded or find them in the destination tab to see whether they would be added, updated, removed, or kept. The interface to browse this is a sort of columns view with only one column. It’s fast and easy enough to use, but keyboard navigation doesn’t work properly. I longed for it to be an outline view so that I could quickly expand an entire subtree and see at a glance which files would be changed. I also wished that it would show how much data would be copied.
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.
It’s hard to benchmark such things, but my general impression is that this is true. The longstanding Smart Update feature copies only the files that have changed. This seems quite a bit faster than before and slightly faster than Carbon Copy Cloner. The new Turbo feature uses the FSEvents log to optimize finding such files. If macOS knows which folders might contain changes, SuperDuper can focus on those and not waste time scanning ones that are identical. When this works, it feels almost impossibly fast. SSD-to-SSD backups of my Mac’s boot drive will take 1–3 minutes instead of more like 20 minutes. This also seems to be faster than Carbon Copy Cloner’s similar Quick Update feature.
Unfortunately, for reasons seemingly out of the app’s control, sometimes Turbo isn’t possible. This can happen if you’ve modified the copy job or if there’s been a huge amount of file system activity since the last backup so that FSEvents doesn’t contain the necessary information. In such cases, SuperDuper will fall back on doing an old-school Smart Update. I found that excluding my destination drive from Spotlight made it much more likely that Turbo would work.
As much as I like Turbo, I don’t end up using it except for the daily scheduled backup of my boot drive to an always-connected SSD. For my other backups, I have multiple destination drives for each source, and I find that the user interface doesn’t scale so well to configuring a separate job for each. That leads to lots of scrolling. So, instead, I use just one job per source and select the destination I want before starting each backup. This counts as editing the job, so it won’t be able to Turbo, but I find that backups to slow spinning hard drives take a long time either way and are dominated by the copying speed rather than the scanning speed.
Successful and failed runs are shown at the bottom of the copy job, with color-coded dots that can be clicked to display details.
This is my favorite bit of interface design in the new version. It very compactly shows you the recent history for that copy job using the same format that’s used for showing the completion status of the most recent run. I can quickly see all the information I usually care about, and you can click a button to see more detailed information if necessary. The downside is that you can’t see as much information at once—or across multiple jobs—as if there were a dedicated log window, and it only shows the most recent 7 runs. But I think this tradeoff is well in keeping with the app’s spirit of making things simple and clear rather than offering every possible option.
The most baffling part of the interface is that after each backup completes or fails it shows an “Apple Intelligence Summary”. Much space is devoted to labeling this and to assuring you that none of your data went into the cloud. I just don’t see what the point of this is. 99+% of the time, my backup either succeeded or failed for a very predictable reason like running out of space. Why do we need AI for this? I trust the AI summary less than I would a hard-coded string from the developer. Perhaps in an obscure situation that the developer didn’t anticipate Apple Intelligence would be able to offer a useful interpretation, but I have yet to see that.
At a technical level, SuperDuper has been split into a “helper” or “server”, which runs the copy, and an interface, which is the part you interact with. That means that, once registered, you can quit the SuperDuper application and your backups will still run. They’ll even run if you log out!
It doesn’t much matter to me that it can back up without launching the app—I like to see its progress—but I appreciate the new architecture for scheduled copies. Schedules are now much better integrated into the app proper rather than being driven through AppleScript.
You can run any number of copies at the same time. If you have four backups you need to do, just click Copy Now for each, and they’ll all run simultaneously.
This is the most important new feature for me. I used to do all my clone backups with SuperDuper. But, over years, my backup needs grew. I now have five main source drives to back up. They are much larger than before, and APFS on spinning hard drives is really slow. Thus, the backups, even with Smart Update, can take a long time. That was a lot to manage with old versions of SuperDuper. Carbon Copy Cloner has long supported multiple simultaneous backups so that I could connect a bunch of destination drives, tell it to start, and when I came back they’d all be done. I didn’t have to be there to wait for each backup to finish and then start the next.
It was just so much easier, so I started using Carbon Copy Cloner for most of my backups. But I still liked SuperDuper and trusted its copy engine, so I continued to use it to do some of the backups of my most important drive (the internal SSD). I think it’s good backup practice to have redundancies, not just in terms of multiple physical drives and storage locations but also for the software creating the backups. Both are quality apps, but it’s possible that there’s a bug or a misconfiguration on my part that might prevent the copying of a file that I need. Why put all my eggs in one basket? Now that SuperDuper also supports multiple simultaneous backups, I’m using it for half the backups of all my drives. On one backup day I’ll do all SuperDuper backups, then the next time I’ll do all Carbon Copy Cloner backups. (I continue to use Time Machine and Arq for additional redundancy.)
If you try this, I strongly recommend writing down which app you used for each destination drive and then doing all future backups to that drive using that same app. And it works better to do the first SuperDuper backup with Erase and Copy rather than trying to Smart Update a Carbon Copy Cloner backup.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but the main one is the different ways that the apps deal with APFS snapshots. Both use snapshots on the source to ensure they’re copying from a consistent state. And both mark completed copies with snapshots on the destination. But the retention of the destination snapshots is very different.
Carbon Copy Cloner can keep them around essentially as long as you have enough free space. It can also prune them out of order, so that you have daily snapshots for the last month and weekly ones going back further. This is managed by the app, though you can also manually delete snapshots yourself using Disk Utility.
SuperDuper’s snapshots are automatically managed by the macOS. I’m personally less fond of this design because in practice the system will choose to clean up old snapshots almost right away. I can’t count on being able to restore from any backup but the most recent. To me, this is a shame because APFS supports multiple snapshots, and there’s plenty of space on the drive to store them, but I can’t use them. It’s just not a design goal of the app.
Again, this ties back to how SuperDuper values simplicity. If it made longer-lived snapshots that weren’t cleaned up automatically, you might get into a situation where you (or another app) wanted to add files to a drive and couldn’t because it seemed to be full. You’d have to understand snapshots or have an app that could delete the SuperDuper snapshots to free up space. Third-party apps aren’t supposed to delete snapshots belonging to other apps, which is why you don’t want to mix SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner on the same destination. If the former needs more space to complete a backup, it won’t be able to purge snapshots created by the latter.
The status information for the backups that are in progress is shown right in the Sources section of the main window. You can see at a glance which drives are being copied and when they’re all estimated to finish. I haven’t found the estimates very accurate, so I’d prefer to see the start time and the percent complete. Flipping between multiple active jobs to check their detailed progress is kind of a chore, but if all you need is the summary information you can close the app and monitor it from the new menu bar icon.
SuperDuper 4 now supports copying to and from any file system the Mac supports. Using a “Photos” drive with both Windows and Mac that’s formatted as exFAT? No problem: you can copy it.
It can also copy individual folders rather than just entire volumes, if you drag them into the sidebar.
I’ve added Shortcuts support, so you can create a shortcut that runs before or after a copy, on success, or on error. Want to send an email on success or failure? Beep when copies are done?
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Not only does SuperDuper let you call a shortcut from a copy—you can create, run, and check on a copy job from a shortcut!
There’s a lot of potential here, and the completion shortcut receives a bunch of JSON describing what happened so that it can make decisions about what to do. On the other hand, I would rather see AppleScript support, as I find Shortcuts confusing and inconvenient. I wish that common completion actions like sending e-mails were built into the app so that they were easier to set up. (You can choose to eject the drive, post a notification, or sleep the Mac without having to write a shortcut.)
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.
The Apple Silicon version was a paid upgrade, but you could run SuperDuper 3 in Rosetta with an old license and still get all the features.
Version 4 costs $43.95, with various upgrade discounts based on the purchase date. There’s no discount if you purchased before July 2020, but us old timers got so many years of free updates it was one of the best deals ever in Mac software. Regardless, it’s not a high price for peace of mind. The new version is, I think, a massive improvement, maintaining the spirit of the original while modernizing and expanding it.
I’ve already said that I use both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner. I think both are excellent—great apps with great customer support. With SuperDuper 4 they’re more similar than in the past, but they remain very different. If you must pick one, I would say that Carbon Copy Cloner is better if you want lots of options and control; if you want persistent snapshots, verification, copying of cloud-only files, or detailed logging; or if you have a very large number of backups. (It does have a Simple Mode, but it’s arguably too simple and limiting.)
SuperDuper is better if you care about bootable backups or want something simple but not too simple. There’s documentation, but you probably won’t need it because so much is explained within the app’s interface. It’s just really easy to set up a backup, see what it’s going to do, see what it’s currently doing, and see what it did before. Pretty much everything happens in a single window, without tabs or separate modes. SuperDuper is all about striking a good balance for most people, doing the right thing with a minimum of fuss.
See also: Adam Engst and Accidental Tech Podcast.
Previously:
- Parachute Backup Acquired
- Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox
- Carbon Copy Cloner 7.1.3
- SuperDuper 4.0 Beta
- CrashPlan Consumer Is Back
- ChronoSync 10
- Arq 7
- SuperDuper 3.1 Supports APFS Snapshots for Both Source and Destination
- SuperDuper and APFS
- Synchronize Pro X 4.1.1
- My New Backup Strategy
Update (2026-08-14): The developer wrote in to say that SuperDuper does try to remember the scroll position in the main window, just not across launches. With the current version, 4.0.2, I find that this mostly works but that it gets thrown off if I’ve expanded any of the triangles to see more details about the currently running job. Then my carefully positioned view will be shifted a bit when I come back to it. It’s hard to get this exactly right.
He also had a great tip about a hidden feature that can relieve some of the scrolling issues I encountered: you can click multiple times on a drive in the list of sources to have it jump to the next active job for that drive, scrolling it to exactly the right spot. When the sidebar has keyboard focus, you can also do this by pressing the Spacebar.
See also: Dan Moren.
Update (2026-08-20): SuperDuper 4.0.3:
For those with a lot of volumes, there’s now a sort control for the source list: you can alphabetically by type, or purely alphabetically.
There’s now an option in the sort pop-up that adds a few sections to the source list.
I like being able to separate the source drives from the destination drives. The update also improves VoiceOver support.
Update (2026-09-09): See also: John Gruber.
Previously:
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Remembering scroll position was one thing I tried and failed to do in my Mac SwiftUI app early on, and eventually gave up. One of those things that should be easy, but isn't. Just one of many regrets about choosing SwiftUI.
-- For those who haven't launched SD! in the last 2 days, 4.0.2 is already out. Launch the app,, look in the lower left, and update.
-- One question - is this Turbo feature automatic, or is there some kind of toggle I can't find?
Yes, the new UI is definitely a bit of a regression for keyboard accessibility, because of course it is. Still, happy to get my upgrade and discount.
Why does it need to understand partition structures? Can't you just leave it to the OS?
And is the blog AI-generated?
By "the blog" do you mean Shirt Pocket Watch? It is absolutely not AI-generated. If you're basing that on my use of emdashes, I think if you look at older posts, you'll see I've always done that.
The UI is pretty keyboard accessible...and it's improving in the next update. Getting Swift UI to do keyboard stuff well is...interesting.
@Dave Thanks for your efforts. Yes, SwiftUI just seems to have that impact. I use VoiceOver so I do have commands, but I notice when arrow-and-Tab-key navigation stops working as well as it used to. It's one reason I tend to gravitate to AppKit apps when possible.
No, not the em-dashes—I use those too—but the word choices. I recognise of course that AI trains on human writing, but seeing a human write like that is discombobulating all the same.
I sent an image of a UI mockup to ChatGPT and asked it to turn it into a xib. And it did. I wired a couple outlets and actions. Fixed an autolayout constraint or two and boom. In SwiftUI that’s like hundreds of lines of fragile code.
I don’t understand why devs are still using this framework
@Sebby I guess, again, my word choice is just...my choice of words. It's been like that before AI was around, and it'll be like that after, too...I've certainly been writing on the 'net for a long time, including usenet groups, etc. The blog itself started in 2005.
Why you see it as "AI" I honestly don't understand. I think, perhaps, people are a little oversensitive right now.
w/r/t VoiceOver, I'm slowly improving the way I handle it... a learning process, trying to expose things in a way that's useful.
@Dave Just in case it's not clear, I'm certainly not criticising! Perhaps you're right, I'm overanalysing … I just want to hear from you, not a machine. If that's you, awesome! :)
FWIW, it didn't clock as LLM-generated for me at all. It's full of human quirks an LLM wouldn't write. For example:
"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."
An LLM would do things like use odd adverbs, like:
"In 2007, I designed SuperDuper v3.0 — or what was supposed to be. A rewrite that did far more while still being unmistakably itself."
Your blog post is also much more succinct than typical LLM output. It does have some of the LinkedIn "one sentence per paragraph" writing, which some people may perceive as fake.
Just tried out SuperDuper! 4 as a long-time SuperDuper! user. Overall, I'm finding the new UI misses the mark—I see what it's trying to do with the natural language approach to configuring a job, but I'd much rather just have a well-designed form. For example, when I first chose to add a copy job, I get a job which gives me no options to choose which files to copy. I need to select a different template, but it's not clear to where templates are defined or if I can define my own.
I very much like the new UI for defining copy rules, though I find it the built-in rules opaque about what they are excluding/including and why. I can't find a place to learn more about these besides enabling them and inspecting the preview. I'm surprised I had to add ~/Library/Caches manually.
Overall, it seems like a net improvement, but not directionally what I would have wanted.
It’s a shame that after all this time, SwiftUI is still so unpolished. Remembering disclosure triangles and scroll positions are the kind of basic niceties that wooed me away from Windows. I never expected this platform to degrade so much
Hi, @Nick M. I don't quite understand your objection - if you add a blank job (as opposed to a templated one), you just pick a destination and then you have all the various options at your fingertips. In general, I want people to copy as much as possible, and not be overly selective...experience has shown that users will exclude things to get stuff to fit on existing drives, and then find later that they've lost data.
That's why I don't exclude caches, too. Yes, they're just caches...but sometimes when you lose "real data" you can end up finding it in a cache...so it's a small price to pay for greater likelihood of recovery in extreme circumstances. My general bias is "keep as much as you can just in case".
@Max Oakland This has nothing to do with Swift UI...I elected to not remember the job's disclosure state, because the intention was to display a summary, not the details...and typically a user does not want that.
Yes, there are exceptions (like Michael), but that's why the decision was taken. It's a "degraded and unpolished developer", not the platform.
It's amazing to me that after all this time, a good backup system still hasn't been integrated into every desktop OS.
Apple started to move this direction with Time Machine, but after a promising initial version, it never seem to be maintained. I think Apple's bar was "most people today do no backups, and so anything more than nothing is a +inf% improvement".
When we all made the shift from PC operating systems to workstation operating systems in the early 2000's, some features that used to be third-party add-ons became integrated with the OS and we never needed to think about them again (remember SuperClock?), while other features became relegated to only third-party add-ons.
I guess these days the stock OS is for running applications, and if you want "great apps with great customer support" you've got to go third-party. I'm not complaining, exactly. I just find it weird where the line got drawn.
The last time I tried to turn on Time Machine, it filled the remaining 150GB on my internal SSD within an hour, crashed the computer, and caused me to lose a bunch of data, including a Parallels image that was running at the time.
@tim - I'm not sure this is right. Apple has substantially reworked Time Machine on APFS destinations, using snapshot deltas and not hard links to retain versions, and they've redone the way it works internally, too. It's quite different (and more reliable) than it was when introduced, so I'm not sure how you've determined that it's not maintained.
@Plume That sounds like a pretty terrible experience, and I'm not sure how it would have happened. Perhaps you were running with very little free space, and a huge VM's HDD image got put into a snapshot that diverged weirdly and couldn't be deleted? Certainly not typical...which isn't to say "impossible"!
Well, Time Machine didn't make it into Apple's list of top 263 improvements at WWDC this year, and there were some pretty obscure items there.
Compared to any other backup software I've used, the TM software and the documentation both look rather sparse, and not noticeably different from ~20 years ago. I'm looking for actual new features, not just "we updated it for our new FS", and actual technical documentation, not just "Check the connection to your backup disk".
I, too, have had TM fail in strange ways (hasn't everyone?), and there's no tooling or documentation to help when that happens. A multinational tech company doesn't get multiple chances to make backups "more reliable" after years of problems.
Earlier this year, the Executive Editor of Macworld wrote a story that began "After upgrading to macOS 26.2, things started to go wrong with Time Machine. Now I have a drive that won't work with my Mac and my backups are gone."
> I'm not sure how it would have happened
I figured I should try again and see if I can replicate the problem, but now when I go to General -> Time Machine, it's just an empty grey panel, by which I mean that there is nothing in there. No text or UI controls, no error message; it's just empty.
