Product Reviews

The cheap price of storage and the easy-to-use, unintrusive nature of Time Machine leave little excuse for failing to make backups. Restoring a whole system from a Time Machine backup though can leave you struggling to meet a deadline. So up steps SuperDuper to help you avoid this by creating a bootable clone of your system.

The main window is very simple: just select a source and a destination (which can be a disk image) and a script to use. Five appear in the free version, providing all that's needed to clone and restore a bootable system. There are also two sandbox scripts, which we'll come to in a moment.

The paid-for version lets you create scripts from scratch or reuse the included ones to exclude unnecessary items such as temporary and cache files. Script commands point to a file or folder and tell SuperDuper how to handle it: either copy it, share it (as an alias to the original) or ignore it altogether. But note that SuperDuper is only for HFS+ volumes; it's not for cloning Boot Camp installations.

Both sandbox scripts use the sharing

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feature to create an alias for each user folder. The second one extends this to nonApple software in the Applications folder. The intent is to provide a testing ground for software before deploying it on the main system. It should catch issues like the recent one between QuickTime 7.4 and some applications, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution.

For example, past versions of iTunes have updated the library structure. In a sandbox system this would be the original on your working system. Update an application and you may find that after rebooting the system, its data or preferences no longer work with the older version. Making the most of this feature requires too much knowledge of application structure. Ultimately it's easier to clone the full system for testing.

The paid-for version's Smart Update and scheduling features can keep documents up to date on the backup anyway.

Smart Update is a far more valuable, paid-for feature that copies only the necessary files to update a cloned system. We performed a full copy of a 30GB installation in about 90 minutes.

After using the system for a few days the clone was revised with Smart Update - this resulted in more than 10GB of files being changed in around half the time it took to make the original clone.

Scheduled backups are another paid-for benefit, though it's a good idea to keep a disk image of a basic working system in case emerging faults are transferred to the bootable clone.

SuperDuper is a worthy complement to Time Machine and it's a good contingency plan to avoid those situations that would cripple productivity when you can least afford them.