After months of beta testing and much eager anticipation, Shirt Pocket Software has released SuperDuper 2.5, finally making the popular backup program fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Although there are other ways to make a bootable duplicate under Leopard, SuperDuper is my personal favorite tool for that task, and I'm delighted to be able to use it once again.

Along with an assortment of bug fixes and minor feature enhancements, version 2.5 offers the important and unusual capability of cloning Time Machine backup volumes. In other words, if your Time Machine drive gets full and you want to move your backups to a larger drive without losing your existing archives, SuperDuper can now make that happen. Previously, the only way I knew to do this was using Disk Utility's Restore feature, with the Erase Destination option selected - not the most convenient procedure. In addition, SuperDuper now makes it possible for a bootable duplicate and a Time Machine archive to share a single volume (though for practical reasons I still generally prefer using separate partitions).

It's kind of funny to think of having a backup utility that helps to manage another backup utility. But this new feature highlights the fact that SuperDuper and Time Machine perform equally essential (and in fact complementary) backup tasks.

SuperDuper 2.5 is a 2.8 MB download. The program costs $27.95; updates from earlier versions are free.