EXCLUSIVES

Disk Warrior 3: Continuing the Fight Against Corruption
Words by Ric Getter
March 2004

Calling this update "long-awaited" may be one of the grosser understatements you'll see in this issue. First predicted to arrive in January of 2002, it was officially announced and previewed at MacWorld a year later. It finally shipped in late spring. But unlike some applications that can tolerate a little glitch here and there, DiskWarrior has to do its job perfectly. And in nearly every case, it does.

DiskWarrior 3 is a from-the-ground-up rebuild of the original program designed specifically for OS X. It's shipped on a CD that boots directly into the utility.

Utilities like Nortons or TechTool Pro are hard disk Swiss Army knives. They do lots of things pretty well. DiskWarrior does the one thing neither of them do. It rebuilds directories from scratch, fixing otherwise hopeless disk problems and recovering lost and damaged files. It scans the drive for files and folders, creates a new directory structure, and compares the two, reporting any differences it finds. If you're running the program from the bootable DiskWarrior CD, you will have the opportunity to compare the new and old disks (actually, their directories) in a preview window. Because the window offers the browsing and copying functions of the Finder, we are guessing this is one of the reasons why this update took so long to appear. We can tell from the activity of our CD drive before the preview window appears, the program is loading a lot of code. (Also, according to Alsoft, pre-Jaguar versions of OS X did not offer some of the internals that DiskWarrior needed to do its job.) If you're running the program on another volume from within the Finder, it will (like Disk Warrior 2) mount the preview volume on the Desktop.

Familiar Interface Users of the earlier versions of DiskWarrior will find themselves in very familiar territory. Aside from the obligatory aqua look, the interface and operation is essentially the same. Because of the significantly greater number of separate files used on OS X, running DiskWarrior takes somewhat longer. However, DiskWarrior 3 does seem to perform better than version 2 on an OS X volume (assuming you have hardware that can boot DW 2'S OS 9 CD).

With certain problems apparently unique to OS X, DiskWarrior can take much, much longer. A case in point is overlapping files, something that occasionally occurs with the hastily written browser caches and happened on a grand scale with a recent update to LimeWire. We've read reports of users waiting up to four days (yes, days) for DiskWarrior to complete the repairs. But, for those with the patience and faith to hold out, it did eventually complete the process and save the disk. The only other fix to this problem is going the reformat/reinstall route. In our tests, purging browser cache files before running DiskWarrior did seem to improve the program's performance.

The other commercial disk utilities that are available are only able to perform directory repairs. These may or may not be successful. (Apple's Disk First Aid repairs files, but leaves directories pretty much alone). As its documentation points out, DiskWarrior is a remedy of first, not last resort. It can actually be much harder to recover lost files after an unsuccessful repair attempt.

(Not) For Emergency Use Only Like its predecessor, DiskWarrior 3 is not a program that you keep on a shelf until you're in disaster-recovery mode. It's mainly a very safe and effective maintenance tool. Disk directories take a lot of abuse and file systems have ways of making on-the-fly repairs to keep things running Ð up to a point. In modern file systems, they can have problems, and, to a degree, create their own patches. The patches are cumulative and after a while, things can get pretty messy. Rebuilding your directory gives you a fresh start. Disk Warrior's rebuild process also puts the directory items back in logical order, so you do get a bit of a performance boost.

The DiskWarrior 3 CD no longer contains a copy of Plus Optimizer, Alsoft's somewhat sluggish but highly effective defragmenting tool. It will still work on OS X volumes, but you must boot into 9 to run it. The program's documentation consists of a clear and well-written 52-page PDF file that can be read, even if you boot from the CD. The program now contains an option that will let you take advantage of the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) diagnostics built into newer ATA drives. You can run the test manually from within DiskWarrior or install a background task that runs the test at specific intervals. This feature can display an alert or even e-mail a warning to a specific address.

If you're anything more than an average user with an easily replaceable system, DiskWarrior 3 is not a useful utility. It's an essential one. This is especially true if you're doing professional video or audio editing, tasks that can real tear up a file system. Best of all, it focuses on one job and does it with virtual perfection.

DiskWarrior 3 > Alsoft, Corp., Price: $39.95 upgrade, $79.95 full.