SuperDuper 3.3 for Catalina
In order to replicate this new volume setup, system backups of APFS volumes must be to APFS formatted volumes. SuperDuper automatically converts any HFS+ destinations to APFS volumes for you (after prompting), so you won’t have to do anything manually in most cases.
That’s too bad given APFS’s poor performance on spinning disks, which is what I mostly use for backups.
Those two volumes are further linked together with “firmlinks”, which tunnel folders from one volume to the other in a way that should be transparent to the user. But they can’t be transparent to us, so we had to figure out how to recreate them on the copy, even though there’s no documented API.
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You can’t turn an already encrypted APFS volume into a volume group. As such, you’ll have to decrypt any existing bootable volumes.
On some user systems, Full Disk Access doesn’t take after install, and they have to restart after installing the new version. This is because our bundle ID has changed due to notarization and the OS doesn’t handle it well.
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In some circumstances, ownership wouldn’t be properly enabled for the system volume of an external Catalina volume group, which made the backup not boot. […] I could go into detail on the latter problem, but rather than bore you, I’ll refer you instead to this old post from 2005[…]
We’ve got a few users whose systems are in a bizarre state where the loader is outputting […] when we run certain system command-line tools.
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We also added a diagnostic that detects a rare situation where a user’s system has broken scripting tools (like a bad Perl install), which can cause problems.
The unexpected part is that just before the beta, we made a change to the installer to try to improve our workaround for systems that required rebooting post-install to make Full Disk Access work. After we made the change, we didn’t re-run the full suite of tests because we (incorrectly) thought the change was isolated to the install process.
However, it was made in a runtime element that was shared with the way we executed
bless.
With volume groups, though, there are two potential volumes to mount...but keychain passwords might be under either the Data volume or the System volume, depending on what the user does.
Eject would sometimes not eject both volumes of a volume group.
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Some people were impatient and didn’t realize HFS+ to APFS conversion might take a while! We now tell them to get a tasty beverage!
I’m happy to announce the release of v3.3 of SuperDuper, our fully Catalina-compatible version: happier, perhaps, then even you are in reading the news. It’s available via the normal update mechanism, or by downloading it from the web site.
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The whole idea of the new version is, if we did our job right (and I think we did), things should just work the way you expect them to. […] But despite that, SuperDuper is doing a lot more things.
There’s one remaining issue for 10.10 and 10.11 users: Erase, then copy backups are failing due to some unexpected “volume transformation” events that are occurring. When we validate the result, we’re being quite cautious, and we’re not seeing what we expect, so we fail the copy.
Previously:
- Catalina App Issues
- APFS Enumeration Performance on Rotational Hard Drives
- Backing Up macOS 10.15 Beta
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
Hiya,
In process of following Super duper instrctions to refromat to APFS, told to select non encrypted. How do I get an APFS encrypted backup as previously with different format ?
Thks
