Alsoft DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

DiskWarrior is a great program that has helped me out of a jam a couple times. Once, in the middle of a project, my Mac locked up and then wouldn't let me log back in completely. Needless to say, I was a little concerned, since I had a deadline looming.

I ran down to the local Apple store and paid too much (Amazon's price is great! Better than you'll get at Apple's stores!) and ran it, nervously thinking it'd never work.

After a semi-slow boot to CD, the DiskWarrior interface came up and prompted me for my password. I entered it, clicked on "Rebuild", and prayed.

In about 5 minutes, DiskWarrior had informed me that it had found errors and fixed them, and had rebuilt my directory. I half expected to lose some work or files, but I clicked on "Replace". Then I rebooted, crossing my fingers.

It worked.

And not only did it work, it worked wonderfully. My Mac had booted up faster than I remembered it booting. I logged in -- again, no problems, -- and was able to pick up exactly where I left off before the crash.

DiskWarrior has given me some reassurance. It's not the safety net that a full drive backup is, but I don't need to worry about something going horribly awry.
And, it's more than just a disaster recovery application. You can schedule periodic tests of your drive(s), and it will alert you if anything has gone wrong. So, mine checks hourly and I have some additional peace of mind. Furthermore, you don't need to be a gearhead to get this to work. I don't want to spend hours making software work, and this is so simple and intuitive out of the box.

It's great for infrequent maintenance, too. It will clean up directory structures that have gotten messed up, and everything seems to run a little smoother.

Bear in mind that a lot of files seem to bog this down. It takes about five minutes to run a full test on my main hard drive, but my second storage drive, with less (but larger) files usually gets done in about a minute and a half.

But, really, that's peanuts when you consider that you could spend all day reformatting and reinstalling, or recovering from a backup and redoing lost work.

Alsoft has made a wonderful product and I don't regret anything -- except that I could have gotten it cheaper if I'd bought it through Amazon. If you own a Mac, you really should get this if you don't have it already. Its one success in my case more than paid for its cost, had I been forced to start from scratch.

The software comes on a Bootable OS X Jaguar CD so it should be able to boot all the latest computers except the new G5's and PowerBooks manufactured since September 2003. The CD also contains DiskWarrior 2.1.1, which was the last of the Classic version.

To run the application, just insert the CD into your CD-ROM drive, tell your Mac to restart and then hold down the 'C' key to boot off of the CD. Once the system has booted you will be presented with the DiskWarrior Main Window. Next you will select the drive you want to repair from the pop-down list box, and then click the Rebuild button. Then wait for the program to run its thorough test on the drive and discover everything it that's wrong with it. It will also at this time create an optimized directory for the hard drive. After the test are completed DiskWarrior will present you with a report showing all the things it found wrong and what it wants to do to correct them. The amazing thing about this program is it hasn't done anything to the hard drive until you approve and it keeps all of those changes in memory until then. This is a concept that I wish Symantec would take with Norton Disk Doctor. While Disk Doctor gives you an option to create an undo file, there are many times that if your running a repair from CD, you don't get an option to create an undo file (In other words if the only writeable drive you can write to is the one your repairing, why would you want to risk corrupting the drive your trying to fix).

On my PowerBook and iBook it seemed to take a long time to run. While I can understand my PowerBook being a little slow (PowerBook Lombard/333Mhz/256MB RAM/10GB Hard Drive) I was kind of surprised that it took my iBook (Dual USB/500Mhz/384MB RAM/20GB Hard Drive) so long to run through its test. Just for kicks I ran a timed comparison of the previous version of DiskWarrior to the new version. When run on the same drive on the same machine, they actually came within 1 second of each other in completing the rebuild process. I believe that there could actually be a speed advantage to the new version if it didn't load a bunch of additional files during Step 8 of the directory rebuild.

The most interesting thing that DiskWarrior found on both machines was the HFS Plus Disk Wrapper had a problem. This was a common issue when Mac OS 9 was released and I thought Apple had fixed the problem a long time ago. The reason I found this interesting was because the Classic version of DiskWarrior never reported this problem.

One other thing that DiskWarrior allows you to do is to install it on your hard drive. Once you do this DiskWarrior will monitor your hard drive for any pending failures. This is important feature because currently OS X doesn't report any errors that come from SMART ATA hard drives. SMART ATA hard drives have the ability to monitor themselves and report a pending drive failure. This could be a critical feature because it might mean the difference between getting your data off the drive versus not getting it at all after failure has already happened.

Things that I would like to see.
Although Alsoft has a product called DiskExpress Pro for disk optimization, it would be nice to see it added to the DiskWarrior product so they had a complete drive care package, especially at the price of $79.95.

Pro's-Still fixes problems that Disk Doctor can't
Con's-Would be nice to see this as a complete drive care package