Is DiskWarrior worth the price?

Even on a clean install, if you haven't used disk warrior, its report will look ugly. I found less beach balls caused by disk activity after using it. Keep in mind it's a pain in the ass without an optical drive. You need one just to create an updated boot version too unless you have a bootable external drive with disk warrior installed. Where it really helped me was external drives. Some drivers and firmware can be flaky. They behaved better post disk warrior. My opinion is if you're not having trouble, don't worry about it. The difference will be much less if your computer is never low on ram during actual use, as it minimizes excess disk activity.

MacBH928 said:

So I did a directory graph for my HDD , and this is what I got as you see in the image with DiskWarrior. It seems pretty damaged according to the graph.

I just want to know is DiskWarrior worth the price? it costs a $100 just to rebuild the directories of your HD.

Does it really help? Or do they exaggerate it? My computers runs fine, no errors and no crashes and after 4 years of use, I see its pretty snappy just as the day I got it.

Do you guys recommend to use this software?

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Please don't make purchasing decisions based on a misunderstanding of how data are stored on your hard drive. Your map produced by DiskWarrior does not even remotely look like that of a damaged file system.

As for the utility DiskWarrior, it is explicitly endorsed by Apple and is [or has been] available through AppleCare. DiskWarrior is not a routine maintenance tool. This utility recovers files by rebuilding directories. It is considered to the most sophisticated consumer file recovery utility for the Mac. Although it is a consumer tool, professional technicians use DiskWarrior to recover files from damaged Mac hard drives. If DiskWarrior can't recover your files, then you need professional intervention which can be incredibly expensive.

File recovery is a non-issue if you maintain current backups. DiskWarrior fills the gap between a current backup and a professional file recovery service.

MacBH928 said:

So I did a directory graph for my HDD , and this is what I got as you see in the image with DiskWarrior. It seems pretty damaged according to the graph.
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I don't see anything indicating damage in that graph.

DiskWarrior can repair drives that some other utilities can't.

MacBH928 said:

It seems pretty damaged according to the graph.

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No it doesn't!
That graph does not represent "damage".

The best thing you can do is ensure you have at least one backup. That way, if any one drive dies, you have at least one other copy you can restore from.

Disk Warrior is very good at repairing problems on disk, but that's usually necessary only when the contents of that drive need rescuing because you haven't got a backup.

In my last post, I stated that DiskWarrior is not a routine maintenance tool. DiskWarrior is not a defrag utility. Defragging does not rebuild directories due to damaged media. Defragging does not recover lost files.

Defragging in Windows is a routine maintenance procedure, but it should not be. It is considered routine maintenance in Windows due to poor design of the Windows file system. Microsoft provides a defrag utility to compensate for the inherently poor design of its file system. OS X automatically defrags itself. Apple does not provide a defrag utility because it is not needed.

DiskWarrior is used to recover lost files on a damaged hard drive. The vast majority of users should never require DiskWarrior because hard drive damage that loses files is a sign that the hard drive should be replaced. The last time that the utility was used on my Mac was more than 10 years ago when a technician used DiskWarrior to recover files on my old hard drive to transfer them to the replacement hard drive.

MisterMe said:

In my last post, I stated that DiskWarrior is not a routine maintenance tool. DiskWarrior is not a defrag utility. Defragging does not rebuild directories due to damaged media. Defragging does not recover lost files.

Defragging in Windows is a routine maintenance procedure, but it should not be. It is considered routine maintenance in Windows due to poor design of the Windows file system. Microsoft provides a defrag utility to compensate for the inherently poor design of its file system. OS X automatically defrags itself. Apple does not provide a defrag utility because it is not needed.

DiskWarrior is used to recover lost files on a damaged hard drive. The vast majority of users should never require DiskWarrior because hard drive damage that loses files is a sign that the hard drive should be replaced. The last time that the utility was used on my Mac was more than 10 years ago when a technician used DiskWarrior to recover files on my old hard drive to transfer them to the replacement hard drive.

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I've used it as a maintenance tool. It was useful, but I wouldn't necessarily purchase it today for that reason. MS offers a defrag tool for legacy reasons. It's not a normal act of maintenance now, nor has it been for many years. In terms of file systems, HFS+ is one of the worst. It's not an issue of MS=bad Apple = good across every metric. Also Disk Warrior just defrags the directories. It doesn't move every file on the disk. OSX does some defragmentation behind the scenes, but not much. Much of it is that defragging every last isn't required on a modern hard drive. It's mostly a thing of the past regardless of whether you use Windows or OSX. You make it sound like the last time you used Windows was pre-XP. Only old people do it these days. It reminds me of people who zap pram every time they encounter a random issue. In both cases unless the action aligns with specific circumstances, it's meaningless.

MacBH928 said:

Actually the last time I used Windows was pre-XP . Defrag is still around I thought things didn't change. It still tells you that you need to defrag though.

Do you have any suggestions for regular OS X maintenance ?
I do the Sudo Periodic and Permission repair regularly

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Routine user maintenance is unnecessary. The OS runs the periodic tasks automatically. Permissions repair is a placebo task that people new to MacOS X convinced themselves is important. All it does is to set the permissions of the application to match those in the application's receipt. This is done automatically when you install new software on your machine.

My advice is a twist on an old exclaim: "Do just do something, stand there." Allowing your Mac to take care of itself is the best thing that you can do to keep it working properly. But, no. Many new OS X users feel that they absolutely must do something. However, there is nothing useful for them to do. So they insist on performing useless tasks.

The time and energy that you spend worrying about finding some useless maintenance task to perform would be better spent using for Mac for productive work or entertainment.

MacBH928 said:

Actually the last time I used Windows was pre-XP . Defrag is still around I thought things didn't change. It still tells you that you need to defrag though.

Do you have any suggestions for regular OS X maintenance ?
I do the Sudo Periodic and Permission repair regularly

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Permissions repair only fixes very specific things. You might run it after an installation in case anything is changed, but most of the time it's unnecessary. I've never had Windows 7 tell me to defrag, and I'm not sure what would prompt that. Whenever someone brings up defragging as an OSX vs Windows thing, I know their last experience with Windows was during the 1990s. A lot of the maintenance stuff is outdated. As an example onyx still has a pre-binding setting in its optimizations. I am fairly certain that hasn't been relevant since Jaguar or earlier. My point regarding disk warrior is that the graphic will basically look that way on any disk where you haven't run disk warrior. The way things are written by default is different from their optimization. I found the disks to hang less, especially externals. I probably wouldn't suggest buying it though. If you already owned a copy, I would say run it ever 6 months or so.

MacBH928 said:

@MisterMe

I have been running computers daily for about 16 years and they always had maintenance software to be run. If things have changed I am sorry, most people who are not technical still get sold maintenance tools like Onyx and are told to run repair permission .

If it was unnecessary maybe they should have advertised the OS as so. Whenever any issue rises up about every site out there says , run maintenance software.

Microsoft should ditch the defrag tool too and advertise "No more defraging"

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I have used Macs since 1989. I used MS-DOS, CP/M, and TRS-80 before that. I have also used IBM VS on IBM mainframes.

I can state without fear of contradiction that what your statement is nonsense. Computer problems are not generic to computers. Computer problems are generic to poorly designed computer hardware and software.

Another thing. You clearly don't understand advertising. As a rule of thumb, companies don't advertise the designed-in quality features of their products. They advertise the fixes to their crappy products or the addition of features that were heretofore missing.

When you see "50% tastier" on the box of Puffy Smacks breakfast cereal, it does not mean the Puffy Smacks is 50% tastier than Rice Yummies. It means that Crap Foods has added sugar to the puffed cardboard that was the old version of Puffy Smacks.

Being a Mac veteran long before MacOS X, I am intimately familiar with maintenance tools like Norton, Central Point, Norton Antivirus, and TechTools Pro. TechTools Pro was good for recovering deleted files. Antivirus software was useful for disinfectecting the odd Windows virus or Office macrovirus. However, most the functions of these tools were unnecessary. Oh by the way, Apple included Disk First Aid with its computers up to MacOS 9. Disk First Aid is now a part of Disk Utilities. As part of Disk Utilities, the OS X version of Disk First Aid has much less functionality than the MacOS 9 standalone version. This is because much less functionality is needed.

People complain to High Heaven about MacOS 9. However, the biggest problem with MacOS 9 was third-party extensions. If you insisted on have an extension dance of three rows of icons at startup, then you may have had to force them to load in a certain sequence. Otherwise, MacOS 9 was very stable and required little to no maintenance.

MacOS X required no user maintenance at all. Let us not forget that OS X is certified UNIX 03. This is a professional operating system that goes back to the mid-1970s. There are servers running Unix whose uptime is measured in years with no user maintenance at all.

thekev said:

I've used it as a maintenance tool. It was useful, but I wouldn't necessarily purchase it today for that reason. MS offers a defrag tool for legacy reasons. It's not a normal act of maintenance now, nor has it been for many years. In terms of file systems, HFS+ is one of the worst. It's not an issue of MS=bad Apple = good across every metric. Also Disk Warrior just defrags the directories. It doesn't move every file on the disk. OSX does some defragmentation behind the scenes, but not much. Much of it is that defragging every last isn't required on a modern hard drive. It's mostly a thing of the past regardless of whether you use Windows or OSX. You make it sound like the last time you used Windows was pre-XP. Only old people do it these days. It reminds me of people who zap pram every time they encounter a random issue. In both cases unless the action aligns with specific circumstances, it's meaningless.

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[doublepost=1489609233][/doublepost]"Only old people do it these days."

I'm doing it, right now. TechTool Pro says, "Rebuild Error Encountered Unable to Rebuild." So, I've turned to DiskWarrior.

BTW, I'm 80. Is that old enough for your ass?

Nivats said:

[doublepost=1489609233][/doublepost]"Only old people do it these days."

I'm doing it, right now. TechTool Pro says, "Rebuild Error Encountered Unable to Rebuild." So, I've turned to DiskWarrior.

BTW, I'm 80. Is that old enough for your ass?

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TechTool is a very bad and (in my opinion) overpriced tool. They often issue warnings not to use a version older than X under some arbitrary revision of OSX without any enforced protections against doing so. Disk Warrior requires updates too, but they don't break things. They're much more reliable in that regard. I certainly wouldn't dismiss it, but SSDs don't slow down as much.

I still personally intend to purchase the upgrade to Disk Warrior 5 one of these days, but I don't know if I would suggest it to someone who isn't currently experiencing any problems.

Also it wasn't a dig against old people. I hope to be a grumpy old guy some day.