OS 10.15.5 Has A Nasty Bug

chscag

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Old news Randy, and yes it does impact SuperDuper. But thanks for posting.

CCC developer has already fixed it with an update. No word yet from the developer of SuperDuper.
 
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Randy B. Singer
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Old news Randy, and yes it does impact SuperDuper. But thanks for posting.

CCC developer has already fixed it with an update. No word yet from the developer of SuperDuper.

Old news? The article I cited came out today. And Mac OS 10.5.5 came out two days ago.

Do you have a citation for SuperDuper! being affected?

And, yes, the article I cited said that there is a beta version of CCC available to use as a work-around. That's one of the reasons I cited the article.
 
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I've e-mailed Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket Software to see what he has to say about SuperDuper!.

If history is a guide, I'll probably hear back from him in a couple of hours. I'll report back.
 

chscag

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Apple did issue guidance (that CCC and Shirtpocket did not follow) about the pending change. At the Bombich blog, he wrote this:
Last year at Apple's Developer Conference, Apple suggested that backup software should use Apple's "Apple Software Restore" (ASR) for cloning APFS volume groups. Initially I dismissed this –

Then later he says this:
If that's the case – if this is not actually a bug and is actually an intentional change by Apple, then I would argue that this is far worse than a bug. First, if third-parties should not set or remove the SF_FIRMLINK flag, then that should be documented alongside the flag's definition (i.e. in /usr/include/sys/stat.h). Second, if you're not going to allow the setting of the SF_FIRMLINK flag, then the system call should return -1 and set errno to EPERM – reporting success and failing is reprehensible. Last, and most important – making such a change in a production OS release with no warning is openly hostile to third-party developers who were relying on the documented functionality.
(Emphasis his)

But Apple DID give a warning about how to make backups that he dismissed, so it wasn't with "no warning" at all. And while is true that documentation should be updated more concurrent to software changes, documentation very often lags development and release.

Basically the two developers ignored the suggestion from Apple, continued doing it their own way, now find that Apple has, in fact, made a change that renders their approach a fail, then blame Apple for not documenting the change in the online help files. And Bombich then says that Apple did this with "no warning" to developers, despite having already said that Apple suggested an approach that he dismissed a year ago. So is it Apple's fault that he ignored the suggestions? (And before you pounce, yes, I was a developer and a manager of developers for 35 years, so I know about errors, flags, documentation.)

The failure to report an error is the bug and needs to be addressed, or the documentation updated to reflect the change, but it's a bit of a stretch to try to dump all of this on Apple. One has to ask if Bombich ever tests its own software. If they had done a full regression test, including testing the creation of a bootable backup from scratch by making and then booting the backup drive, this problem would have shown up much earlier. Sorry, but this one is definitely on Bombich and Shirtpocket for failure to adequately test their products and dismissing the guidance a year ago.
 

chscag

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Well, at least Mike Bombich has been honest about this. Haven't heard anything from the developer of SuperDuper (Shirtpocket software) though. ?
 
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Well, at least Mike Bombich has been honest about this. Haven't heard anything from the developer of SuperDuper (Shirtpocket software) though. ?


I posted the link to Dave Nanian's (of ShirtPocket Software/SuperDuper!) blog about this in post number 7 in this thread (above):

Shirt Pocket Watch - Black Boxes and Bugs

The problem isn't that he (and almost certainly Bombich) just negligently failed to ignore Apple's guidance, the problem is that they rewrote their software to use the black boxed routines that Apple recommended, and they were hugely unreliable. Given that they weren't told that the old routines would be ripped out of the Mac OS, they went back to the old way of doing things because they worked.

Now it appears that, even when CCC and SD get their software fully functional again, their products will be unreliable. And it will all be on Apple.
 
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From the ShirtPocket article Randy linked:
So, during investigation, when we discovered how incredibly buggy and user-hostile it was, even when it started "working", we took the work we'd done to implement asr support and tabled it.

Translation: We found asr buggy so we quit working with it. Even when it did work.

Instead of working with Apple to make it better, to make it work better or more consistently or whatever complaint they are trying to make, they just tabled the project, leaving it just like it was. That decision was made despite, in their words:
If you've seen that WWDC session, you know that Apple specifically mentions the new asr capability as being perfect for "Backup programs", and we sort of looked at that as code for you're going to be forced to use this eventually.
Emphasis theirs.

So they knew that they would have to use it eventually, and when eventually came they skewer Apple for bugs they didn't work with Apple to fix? And this is Apple's problem?

I'm still not seeing how bad development practices and business decisions are somehow Apple's problem.
 

chscag

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CCC was updated today to version 5.1.18. Notes say the problem has been corrected along with a few other things.
 
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CCC was updated today to version 5.1.18. Notes say the problem has been corrected along with a few other things.

Awesome! Thanks!

I just spoke to Dave Nanian at ShirtPocket Software/SuperDuper!. He's on it.

He didn't have an ETA for a fix. Knowing him he won't release anything until it's the best that it possibly can be.

He did say that he has a manual work-around for those who badly need it.

I'm always stunned by the fact that he answers each support request personally, and usually within a couple of hours. I don't know when he finds the time to program.
 
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Reading Dave's Blog on SD, this asr only applies to new cloning programs and erased external drives. Went ahead and updated to OS X.15.5 and after routine back up yesterday, today backed up under OS X.15.5. No problems whatsoever and booted just fine.
 

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