SupererDuperer
shirtpocket.com
shirtpocket.com
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.
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!
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.
Apparently you are wrong because parent clearly stated they would appreciate it
Actually it should. See, I can say the same thing too.
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.
They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUIDs, the sort of thing that never happens to anyone else). This matters even if you never need support: Their software is battle-tested by decades of user experience that they understand.
This leads to software convergence, which this rewrite furthers. At first SuperDuper! appeared to me to be oversimplified to avoid trouble at all costs, while Carbon Copy Cloner appeared to be a collection of enthusiast scripts. One could in fact find the scripts driving either; I expanded SuperDuper!'s scope by directly calling an internal script for years.
Decades ago I used Retrospect. They were arrogant twits but they supported external tape drives and such. My breaking point came when when my life turned bicoastal, and their time zone bug forced full backups after every flight. No MBA stereotype could prepare me for the stupid brushoff I heard at a MacWorld show over this. External drives had become affordable enough to motivate a switch to SuperDuper!
More recently there was a macOS release that put the category into crisis, and Carbon Copy Cloner figured it out first. I switched and I haven't looked back. I loved SuperDuper! and I love Carbon Copy Cloner. How much control surface do you want? You have to see for yourself.
How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-delet...
SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner are as close as you can get to a hot spare. For data drives, interchangeable.
Time Machine's virtue is single file recovery.
Arq is off-site storage. Any hybrid backup strategy can fail under scenarios better imagined than experienced. Now that I'm no longer bicoastal, Arq (and a safety deposit box) saves me if my house burns down.
It works. It does its job. It doesn't pester me with popups. It didn't get bloated. It didn't get rewritten using Electron to support New Enterprise Features. It didn't get a built-in sync client for my pictures and videos so that I can share them with my team. It didn't get ads. It didn't get enshittified in any of the hundreds of possible ways that other apps did.
I find it ridiculous that all I paid for this experience was… $27.95 back in 2006 (I just checked the receipt). That's $1.40/year. I have no idea how Dave can make a living this way, and if he ever introduces subscription pricing, I'll be happy to subscribe (cue the HN hater crowd with their knee-jerk reaction "subscriptions BAD!" and downvotes).
If you don't like the enshittification of everything around you, support software that doesn't do that.
Thank you for the fantastic app, Dave. I will happily pay for the upgrade and will happily keep paying, because good apps are worth paying for!
One of the things I realized is that backups are about as “critical” a function as you can get in personal computing. I ultimately decided to stick with Carbon Copy Cloner because, in this case, it just made sense to use something battle-tested.
I’m happy the developer of SuperDuper got the chance to build the version he wanted to build. But from the outside, reading the blog on mobile, it’s hard to ignore that the website is broken and appears to have been generated with an LLM.
The fact that AI was used to create the website isn’t a problem in itself. It’s the lack of attention to detail in shipping the website broken. It makes me wonder about the state of the application itself.
In the case of SuperDuper 4. The application could be extremely well tested. But as a potential customer, I have no way of knowing that, and the presentation doesn’t inspire the confidence I’d want before handing it my backups.
Cases like this are where I really appreciate open source projects. Having the ability to look at the source directly gives me confidence. In this case, all I have to go off is a broken LLM generated website.
> In this case, all I have to go off [...]
Well if you're looking for evidence that SuperDuper is good (and if you accept appeals to authority from internet strangers), SuperDuper is part of John Siracusa's backup strategy: https://atp.fm/703 John Siracusa reviewed macOS for ten years for Ars Technica (these _reviews_ are magisterial), and is an authority on the Mac.
All kinds of software big and small should see a very noticeable increase in activity.
Sometimes slop, for sure, and sometimes people with the wrong incentives call the shots. That's the bad scenario and we've all seen that already.
But when controlled by skilled developers (who actually care) it should lead to more features, less bugs, better security, documentation that's up to date in several languages and so on.
Everything from MacOS, Windows and Linux to small tools that have existed for decades should improve faster than ever. From what I understand we got the largest security patches in the history of Windows, macOS and iOS this summer. That's another sign.
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".
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.
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.
It’s also very likely that most copy will be at least edited, if not completely written, by an LLM. There’s just too much upside. Some people may pass every comment they make, on every venue, through an LLM.
Some folks are likely to write agents to be their entire public persona, but that’s just silly (however, I guarantee it’s already happening -people are silly).
For myself, I’m in the middle. I use an LLM to assist in my development, but without resorting to a full agentic “write me a Facebook” methodology.
I will also often use an LLM to edit copy that I use in my apps, or in things like the App Store page for my apps. In some cases, the edit may be a full rewrite, and I’ll choose the rewrite, over my original copy. Usually, I will just use suggested minor edits, and grammar corrections.
I’m not [yet] confident in using LLMs for main translation, but they have been useful for very small “patch” translations.
Overall, LLMs have been a huge help, and I’ve been coding for over 40 years. I’ve been writing, for much longer. I’m not going to use a quill pen, just because it’s fashionable. I’m retired, and only have so much time left, to get a lot done. I appreciate these new tools.
If the bar is that all code and copy must be hand-written, artisanal prose, then it’s unlikely most modern, production-oriented venues will be satisfactory. I assume that new venues will appear, catering to that demographic. I doubt HN will be that.
HN detectives, hard at work. I wish there was a way to automatically hide all the comments saying "but I think LLM was involved in this software". These days it seems like most of the content here on HN.
This is especially galling when we discuss software that has been around for >20 years and that people (actual users, not HN haters) universally love. See other comments around here.
GOTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219219