My conversation with Dave goes above and beyond what I’d call “support”. Not only that, I hadn’t even registered SuperDuper! yet—I planned to if it worked for me, but I was in the middle of proving that out, and I didn’t mention that to Dave at all. This kind of support is why I’m happy to “pay for software”. I put that in quotes because in my mind, I’m not really paying for the software, I’m making sure that Dave has time to continue to be amazingly responsive to questions like mine…

(via Ted Leung on the air, Thanks, Ted!)

I didn’t know it at the time, I made two huge mistakes when I settled on the various sweated-over terms used in SuperDuper! While the vast majority of the wording is clear to the vast majority of users, it’s pretty obvious at this point that Safety Clone and Copy Script have “prior experience” associations that interfere with what I was trying to get across.

Let’s take Safety Clone first.

Sadly, I no longer remember exactly what I was thinking when I came up with it (probably involved dancing through the Land of Chocolate, or maybe a funny monkey), but what I didn’t consider was that it might be confused with “Cloning” in the “full disk copy” sense. (Yeah, I know—seems obvious now, after all, it does kind of include the word “clone”.)

Some users come to SuperDuper! with prior experience, and rather than reading the (hopefully helpful) What’s going to happen? section of the UI, choose one of the Safety Clone scripts to back up all their files.

As I said in my previous Safety Clone post, this does not back things up. But, to some, it sounds like it does. Bad mistake.

I’m pretty sure this is going to be easy to fix in v2.0 with a wording change. Rather than calling this a “Safety Clone”, I’m thinking of calling it a Sandbox—so the two scripts would be “Sandbox - shared users and applications” and “Sandbox - shared users”. The “Sandbox” term clearly resonates with users, and I don’t think it’ll be confused with a full backup/clone. That’ll make the two real backup scripts—“Backup - all files” and “Backup - user files”—stand out much more.

Copy Script is a bit more problematic. A copy script is really just a way of specifying files you’re going to copy, ignore or share. It has a text field for a description that’s shown in the What’s going to happen? section, and a way to “build” on scripts that are already created. That’s about it.

What it’s not, then, is a script. It’s kind of a file picker. With some other useful stuff.

Anyway, it implies a complexity that isn’t really there, which scares users away. (And, it has a poorly designed UI, which we’ll be addressing eventually, but that’s the subject for another post.)

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet come up with a better term, so Copy Script it is… for now. I just don’t like File Picker or File Selector or Selector or Chooser or… Roget’s, take me away!

You know, I was about to purchase SuperDuper but I found it incredibly confusing. I wanted SuperDuper to produce a disk image that could be restored using Apple Software Restore. I did NOT want SuperDuper to make the target drive “identical” to the source drive as I have files resident on the target drive that I do not want altered.

(via Apple’s Discussion Boards—Sorry, Mister Squid, but thanks (really!) for the feedback, more of which can be found in the thread I linked to.)

As I indicated in the thread, users can accomplish this by selecting “Disk Image...” in the destination pop-up in the main window. Anyone else confused, or have suggestions on how we might make this less confusing?

I restored my clone using SuperDuper! and, as usual, it went flawlessly. (Side note: He could charge triple for that program, and I would pay)

Just tell me where to send the bill, Dan!

(via The Unofficial iMFAQ News—Thanks, Dan!)

My experience — the software backed up my 80 GB (actually available 74.52 GB) containing 42 GB of data (204,483 files) in I hour and 15 minutes, a time comparable to other products I have reviewed for macC. Hurray, it passed the ultimate test of the backup software. My backup booted when I selected it as my startup disk. If you can’t boot it up as a startup disk, the backup is less flexible. Nevertheless, you can indeed recover you user files from it. Buy it and switch — I did. Do it now, not yesterday.

(Via MacCompanion: Thanks, anonymous reviewer!)

Hey, look ma, no exclamation point in that title! Had to happen sometime.

So, the Safety Clone.

The Safety Clone is one of the most unique things that SuperDuper! does, but also one that is potentially misunderstood. I was really happy to see Ted Landau’s Macworld post suggesting it for Tiger, as it’s a pretty painless way of testing whether an OS upgrade works, but it’s important to understand what it is, and what it isn’t.

First off, the Safety Clone is not (not!) a “backup” in the conventional sense, so please don’t use it this way. We provide two scripts—“Backup - all files” and “Backup - user files” that are intended to be used as backups… hence their names. But the Safety Clone is something entirely different.

The idea is this: the Safety Clone isolates a copy of your system on its own partition. When you boot from it, you can install system-level updates (like Tiger) in this “Sandbox” while still retaining the ability to “roll back” to your original should something go wrong.

How do we do this?

Basically, the Safety Clone copies the “system” files that are considered to be “owned” by Apple: most of the things outside your Home folder. And, it shares those files that are “owned” by you.

For the more technically inclined, we “share” the files by symlinking them as appropriate. Details of what files are shared and what files are copied can be obtained by examining the script involved. If you have questions, ask!

So, we create two copies of your system—one in the “Sandbox”—but have only one copy of your user files, which reside on the original drive. When you boot from the Sandbox, you’re on an isolated system, but you’re changing your original user files. That way, when you boot back to your original OS, all the changes you made are there—because you changed the original files!

Just remember: it’s not a backup. It’s a checkpoint of your system that allows rollback of the OS. You must continue to back up your original volume if you want to protect against data loss. (Backing up the “Sandbox” isn’t usually necessary, since the things stored on it aren’t “personal”.)

Tips and tricks about “rolling back” in the next tedious installment!

First, I made a complete and bootable duplication of my PowerBook on a recently assembled 300 gigabyte external FireWire drive. In the past, I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner for this task, but due in part to the fact that it hasn’t yet been updated for Tiger, I opted for Shirt Pocket’s elegantly simple SuperDuper! — I now happen to prefer it over Carbon Copy Cloner, anyway.

(Via Khoi’s great Subtraction blog, which kicks design ass: Thanks, Khoi!)

Wow, a lot of you are upgrading to Tiger! And I mean a lot!

Thanks to everyone who snagged a copy of SuperDuper! over the past few days: I really appreciate the registrations, and it’s great to see that you’re appreciating the program, too!

I’m in the middle of a post that talks about the origin of the Safety Clone and some tips, so stand by…

There are many excellent programs for “cloning” your drive. My recommendation here is SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. It boasts a unique Safety Clone feature that creates versions of your old (Panther) and new (Tiger) systems on two separate volumes. Both systems remain current with the files in your Home directory, so you can easily revert back to Panther if desired.

(Via Macworld’s Tiger Installation Guide—Thanks, Ted!)

To follow-up on yesterday’s post, the inevitable question is: how do files get like this in the first place?

As far as I can figure out, this floating owner “feature” is part of OSX’s OS9 compatibility, and also has to do with the “Ignore ownership on this volume” checkbox you’ll find in the Get Info window for non-boot volumes.

It’s important to remember that OS9 has no concept of ownership whatsoever. So, when a file is created by an OS9 application, running in OS9 itself, it has to choose a user that’s going to own the file.

But what user should it choose? As I said, there’s no real concept of ownership in OS9. And if you randomly just pick a user—say, the first one—there’s no guarantee that you only have one user on your machine… and no way to ensure that, once you’re in OSX, the correct user owns the file.

There’s a bit more complexity to this whole “user” thing. While a user has a name (the “short user name” you select when you first create the account), the system doesn’t really assign the “name” as the owner of the file. Instead, it uses a User ID, which is a number.

On OSX, the first user account created is given the User ID 501. The next account created is 502, etc. These numbers are what are associated with the files on your disk, not the short user name, which is more for your convenience than anything else.

This can create some confusing situations, though, when you bring a disk to another computer, and turn “Ownership” on. If it’s another user’s computer, and their account was the first created (most are), that means their User ID is the same as yours. So, your files will look like they’re owned by them!

Similarly, if you have more than one computer in your office (or family), and the accounts weren’t created in the same order, your account may be “501” on one machine, and “505” on another! (Here, to avoid this problem, I make a habit of creating all my accounts in the same order on all machines.)

No doubt this is why Apple allows you to turn ownership off when you attach a FireWire drive to your machine… this causes all the file owners to float!

So, Apple compromised. Since they couldn’t randomly pick a user, and they didn’t want to force permissions on OS9—which would cause serious compatibility problems—they did the next best thing. They made these OS9 files owned by “everyone”, all at once. In other words, they made the owner float.

When the owner’s floating, it looks like it’s owned by the user looking at it. So, if the file is saved in OS9 (or stored on a FireWire disk with “Ignore ownership on this volume” checked), it’ll be owned by whatever user looks at it.

Even if that user is a Backup program running as root, like SuperDuper!. Which brings us full circle.