The thing I like most about SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket Software is that it just works. That’s the reason for the 3.5 month delay between Leopard’s release and the release of the new version yesterday - the guys wanted to be absolutely certain that it continued to do so. And it definitely does.

The way it’s most used here is to make full images of machines’ system drives, updated nightly. This way, if an internal hard drive fails (our Macbook Pros have been pretty heavily thrown about when travelling in the past, and we have had drive failures) all we need to do is get a new drive, install it, then restore directly from the SuperDuper drive. Best of all, we can continue to use the machine - albeit slowly - booted off the external drive.

We’ve been trying that today, and are pleased to report that it all works perfectly for us. There was only one small problem - SuperDuper uses a series of scripts to exclude certain files from the backup. We extended that with our own script, to exclude other thing we didn’t care whether they were backed up or not. One script has vanished - the “Exclude Spotlight Search Index” script - and this caused our backups to fail to start until we modified them to remove this script. After that it’s been fine.

We’re breathing a sigh of relief here. We have our bootable backups back. While we don’t mistreat our machines, accidents can and do happen. Now the process of recovering from such an accident is simple again.

SuperDuper 3.5 is a free upgrade for existing users, and $27.95 to unlock full functionality for new users. Feature-limited demos are free.

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