My MacBook needs a good clean up and I used DiskWarrior in the past but it won't work on AFPS anymore. There are a few things that don't work fine, for example, I can't download my Apple books anymore.
I use a MacBook 2016 with Mac OS Big Sur 11.4
MacBook
APFS is proprietary to Apple and arrived with High Sierra in 2017. Since then there are a few vendors who have added support for APFS. But the built-in Disk Utility should be enough especially with modern SSD drives. Typically you would run the First Aid at the lowest level first and work your way up to the Container and then the Physical Disk.
Today's SSD drives are ridiculously stable and reliable. I have a tens of thousands of PCs and Macs at work and it is extremely rare for an SSD to fail. While HDD disks fail all the time. APFS was never really designed for HDD's and support was added later on after the initial release of APFS. Then they added Fusion Drive support after that.
That being said, most of the 3rd party products for APFS offer more data recovery features than disk maintenance features. Again, Disk Utility is recommended for any normal maintenance and repair. But if that fails and you have an HDD with bad sectors then something like this should help considerably:
https://www.remosoftware.com/remo-mac-data-recovery
https://www.stellarinfo.com/data-recovery-mac.php
I cannot stress enough the importance of backup in todays world of SSD and hardware level encryption on the newest Macs. If you have a backup, you don't need to repair or recover from disk failures.
Any Mac with a T2 Security Chip (iMac Pro, Mac Pro (2019), MacBook Pro's 2018+) or now the M1 Apple Silicon Macs are factory encrypted out of the box. Encryption seriously complicates recovery.
There have been firmware updates from Apple where the MacBook Pro w/T2 screen and all the lights go out and it really looks like it's been turned off and people went and manually held the physical power button as a result. Thus interrupting a firmware update to BridgeOS running on the T2 chip and reset the T2 Secure Enclave meaning they wiped all the private keys out. Thus leaving you with an encrypted disk you could not recover even if you had the recovery key. The recovery key is a public key which has a private key pairing stored on the Secure Enclave within the T2 Security Chip co-processor SoC running BridgeOS. If the private key is gone the public key pairing will do you no good whatsoever. If you had no backup your data was gone with no chance of recovery. The only choice at that point was to perform an Internet Recovery to re-install macOS. This actually happened to dozens of users at my company. They received the macOS update and it ran and while it was updating BridgeOS (firmware update) they thought it powered off and held the power button till it booted and then they couldn't login to the Mac and all their data was lost. Apple has since put up text to indicate that it may appear off but it most certainly is not and to not interrupt the process. But it could still happen if they happen to power cycle the Mac at the worst possible moment during a firmware update on a T2 equipped Mac.
With the Apple Silicon Mac's you can't use Internet Recovery nor can you boot off external drives if the internal drive is gone and you will need a second Mac running Apple Configurator 2 and use a DFU Reset recovery method (much like an iPhone) to re-install macOS on the Apple Silicon Mac if you managed to brick it that badly. Most people will never brick an Apple Silicon Mac but people have done it by mistake. Especially engineers and those taking deep risks messing about trying unorthodox things or even orthodox things that used to work but no longer do with Apple Silicon Macs.
That is why backups are absolutely critical with the latest hardware from Apple. The combination of system board soldered RAM/CPU/SSD and the tightly coupled SoC to HBA RAM with fabric connectivity instead of a PCIe bus plus Secure Enclave hardware encryption makes it even more important. It is certainly possible to end up in a scenario where the Mac is bricked completely and if you don't have a second Mac you will need to take it to a repair shop to get macOS re-installed.
Luc Therrien wrote:
My MacBook needs a good clean up and I used DiskWarrior in the past but it won't work on AFPS anymore. There are a few things that don't work fine, for example, I can't download my Apple books anymore.
I use a MacBook 2016 with Mac OS Big Sur 11.4
What issues are you having...when you say it "needs a good clean up" (?)
Third party cleaning apps can cause more issues then solve—and are not recommended.
If you want to get a good look at your System config. and reveal conflicts or issues, you can download/run this trusted utility https://etrecheck.com
If you need help interpreting the report you can post it here in its entirety in the "Additional Text" box in the editing toolbar below, in your reply.
LOL. I give props to Alsoft, they had a great product for a long time. Yes on the rotating multi-backups. I like CarbonCopyCloner, myself.
I used DiskWarrior for checking and correcting or rebuilding the file directory. This would solve over 90% of my problems. This is what I want to do again but can't because it can't rebuild an AFPS directory. That's why I'm looking for an alternative,
FWIW, even before any of the stuff you mentioned, trusting your digital life to a single device has always been an accident waiting to happen. Actually, two types of backups should be done as a backup itself can fail.
As inexpensive as external drives are these days, there is no excuse not to be doing backups.
As an aside, while doing some computer desk house cleaning today I came a across a Disk Warrior USB stick and promptly tossed it in the trash.
It's not the 1990's anymore my friend. Unnecessary.
Sean_W,
I've done all those things already. Until this recent problem, my books purchased through my iPhone were automatically downloaded on my Books app on my Mac.
So what do you use as an alternative, when necessary?
So what do you use as an alternative, when necessary?
A back up.
Excellent explanation, thanks for taking the time to edify the conversation.
Is there an alternative to Alsoft DiskWarrior?
