Originally published at: SuperDuper 3.6.1 - TidBITS
Adds compatibility with macOS 12.3 Monterey and works around issues with Apple Software Restore replication. ($27.95 new, free update, 9.2 MB, macOS 10.10+)
I feel compelled to provide a shout-out for SuperDuper! It is simpler and easier to use than other solutions and has saved my cyber-butt on multiple occasions. Making a bootable clone of my different systems is “Super!” easy and those backups are always reliable. Insert additional gush and lavish praise here.
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Decent product for what it does…but in these days of it being really hard to actually produce a bootable clone cloning a whole drive isn’t as important as it used to be. I own it as well as CCC…and frankly CCC is much more full featured. Both will…sort of…produce bootable clones but both rely on the Apple ASR utility which Apple has stated will be deprecated.
Cloning the data partition on current APFS bootable drives is a lot easier…and I for one have given up on making a bootable clone. Clone the hidden data volume instead since the whole read only sealed, signed, and delivered boot volume isn’t really needed. I do maintain bootable backup drives…but they get updated by booting from them and updating in System Prefs instead so all that signing, crypto hashing and all just happens.
In addition…I’ve found that for my purposes…backing up sets of folders from one place to another place is a far more flexible backup routine…in addition to TM of course as well as BackBlaze for offsite. And for cloning folders…CCC is far, far easier to configure and maintain.
SD had it’s day…but its feature set has not grown or changed much with passing of time…and the author and I had a conversation about making it easier to clone folders some years back. His statement was that he was only interested in duplicating entire volumes and had zero interest in expanding the capabilities beyond that. That’s when I started looking for something else…started with Sync and tried Chronosync and then found CCCs which just works. I’[ll keep my copy of SD until it won’t launch anymore…but I haven’t actually used it in probably 5 years so upgrading to the Apple Silicon license isn’t worth it…although others mileage certainly can and should vary.
I’m a big fan of Carbon Copy Cloner too.
- It is time-tested. I’ve never had a significant problem.
- The support is above and beyond.
- It told me about a drive failing even when a SMART utility didn’t.
- And it has an integrity checker built in - so if you have bit rot it knows whether the original or duplicate is the corrupted one.
The author is a clone.
I like SD exactly because of its focus and the fact that it changes little over time. No feature bloat, just razor sharp focus on getting one thing done and doing that well. If you’re a bare bones user, it even does so for free.
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Thanks for the comments here. As a lazy back up person, I’ve been happy with Super’s one mission/no bloat approach but have wondered why nobody talks about Super and everyone talks about CCC. Now I know, thanks again. And to the point about the future of bootable clones…this blog post for CCC sort of, um, shows me my path forward (so I can be even lazier now w/ CCC’s features):