Re: Best Disk Maintanace/repair programs

In article <melcom-5AC43D.10455025112008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mel Comisarow <melcom@xxxxxxx> wrote:

What is the current thinking about the optimum disk maintenance/repair
program(s) for OS 10.5? You know, Disk Warrior, TechTool Pro, Drive
Genius, Data Rescue, etc. Some of these programs have very recent
updates. Thanks

Back up regularly. Use Time Machine if there isn't some specific reason
it doesn't fit your use case, because it's a much more convenient and
comprehensive backup solution than simple cloning (which seems to be the
most common alternative for Mac users these days).

If anything goes horribly wrong, restore from your backups. This can
often be faster than running something like Disk Warrior, and probably
gets you a cleaner end result.

And you don't even need to keep a second bootable drive around with Time
Machine to restore your backups the way you do with some other backup
utilities; when you boot from a Leopard installer disc there's a menu
option there to restore a Time Machine backup.

As far as preventative maintenance, you really don't have to bother
these days. De-fragmentation is a non-issue in current versions of OS X.
Space allocation policies avoid it in the first place, and the system
automatically defragments files in the process of loading them just to
be on the safe side.

If you happen to keep your drive 95% full all the time and have a high
file turnover rate and need consistent sustained bandwidth (for editing
more demanding video formats, for instance) you might actually manage to
develop a fragmentation problem that impacts your work. But even then,
the solution to this isn't to run de-fragging software. It's to not keep
your drive 95% full all the time.

Journaled HFS+ is also quite resistant to file system corruption. You
might want to run Disk Utility every couple of months just to be sure,
but frankly even that probably isn't worth your time unless you're
experiencing a specific problem.

Fixing permissions.... There are a few very specific problems it fixes.
It's worth trying if you're having an issue that's plausibly
permissions-related. But it's worth trying mostly because it's so easy,
not because it's likely to actually resolve most problems. Anyone who
tells you should do it on a regular basis, you should ignore.

It's also important to understand exactly what fixing permissions does.
It sets file permissions back to what the installer package that
originally contained the file said they should be. Those are often not
the only possible correct set of permissions. And permissions don't just
spontaneously mutate; they're changed by some process or other. So if
you happen to run "Fix Permissions" and it finds some stuff, that
doesn't actually mean anything was wrong.

As far as rebuilding your file system structures with Disk Warrior once
a month or something, you're probably far more likely to lose data by
doing that than by doing nothing. Think of it like having surgeons open
you up to check around inside when there's nothing particularly wrong
with you. The risks of the procedure are greater than the odds that
they'll find something sufficiently important that it justified those
risks in the first place.

But to reiterate... backups, backups, backups. The four most common
causes of data loss are individual file corruption, file system
corruption, accidental user deletion, and hardware failure. Incremental
backups protect you from all four. File system maintenance utilities
protect you from one, if that. And not a particularly common one these
days.

--
"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all
things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in
our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your
answer." -- Barack Obama, November 4th, 2008
.

Relevant Pages

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