SuperDuper 4: A 22-Year-Old Mac Backup Tool Gets a Ground-Up Rewrite

After 22 years, Shirt Pocket has released SuperDuper 4, a complete rewrite of its popular macOS backup tool. The new version abandons the document-based architecture of its predecessor in favor of 'Copy Jobs' stored internally and organized by source. This change reflects how users actually think about backups: you start with a source, not a file.

The core design elements that made SuperDuper beloved—the text-based 'What's going to happen?' preview and the step-by-step status view—remain, but they've been modernized. Configuration is now done inline via bold, underlined links that open pop-ups, with the effect immediately reflected in the preview. A new Preview button even runs a dry-run copy without making changes, showing exactly what would be updated, added, or deleted.

Performance is the headline feature. Smart Updates are now 2x to 10x faster, with a new Turbo mode that leverages APFS snapshots to achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup. The author reports a typical nightly backup of an 8-million-file, 2.5TB volume dropped from 40 minutes to about 1 minute with Turbo.

Under the hood, SuperDuper 4 splits into a background 'helper' process and a UI, so backups run even when the app is quit or the user is logged out. Multiple copies can run concurrently, and the tool now supports any file system the Mac can mount, including exFAT and network volumes. Copy Scripts have been replaced by Copy Rules, which are easier to create and preview. Shell scripts are gone, replaced by Shortcuts integration—you can run shortcuts before/after copies and even create or manage copy jobs from within a shortcut.

SuperDuper 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. It's the first paid upgrade in the product's history, though free for recent purchasers and discounted for others based on purchase date. Unregistered users can still make full, bootable backups for free.