[Twitch]

I'm really sick and tired of having SuperDuper fail during smart updates. It really has cost me far too much time and energy. The problem?

When smart updating large volumes (100's of GB's or several TB's) SD will copy first then delete. 90% of the time in this situation I will run out of disk space on my destination volume because often times a project folder (I'm a composer writing music for feature films so you can probably imagine my project folders often exceed 40GB's) will be moved to another location on my source volume or even possibly get renamed.

Even though the volume I'm mirroring to is of equal size as the source, the backup consistently fails because SD is DELETING said project folders from the destination only AFTER it has tried to copy the seemingly new project folder (even though it may really just have been renamed or moved)

The argument the developer uses to justify this as the ONLY reasonable smart update behavior is that deleting before copying starts is dangerous because what if there is a hardware failure during the backup operation, you'd loose that project folder and any others that have been moved or renamed on the source volume.

This is flawed logic for two very important reasons:

1. A failed smart update under these circumstances means the user has to perform an erase and backup to get it to work, thus exposing their ENTIRE volume to data loss in the event of a hardware failure. (Not to mention the needless wasting of their time and system availability)

2. Any half-way experienced sys admin keeps AT LEAST 3 backups of their critical data with one being located off-site in case of theft, fire or natural disaster.

I'm not saying this should be the default mode of operation (preference setting would do just fine). But seriously it's been over 2 years and nothing has been done to address what I and many others in the audio and video industry see as an obvious and serious short-coming of this software.

So, I've decided to discontinue use of this software (with the exception of creating bootable system backups) until the developer does something to address the situation. For the foreseeable future I'll be using RSYNC to perform my mirroring operations with the, oh so nice -DELETE-BEFORE command line argument.

It adds an extra 5 minutes to my backup routine, but compared to having SD continually erasing and backing up a 4 TB volume, it's a small price to pay.