Drive Genius v. Disk Warrior

Hello! Having surfed these boards for the last 2-3 years I see more faith put in DiskWarrior than anything else but I've also seen instances where drivegenius worked fine also. I personally use DiskWarrior. Tom

Chuck:

I've used both, Drive Genius is nice because it has many functions. Disk Warrior is limited, it only does one thing which is rebuild the directory, but it does that one thing better than anything else.

I've had Drive Genius fail to repair a disk that Disk Warrior then repaired. Drive Genius would be nice to have if the $99 price tag is no big deal to you. But Disk Warrior I consider an essential app for all mac users.

You should also have a utility program that runs maintenance scripts and deletes cache. Cocktail is a good one, make sure you get the right version for your OS. With any utility or repair program it's absolutely essential you have the most up to date one for your system.

I'm testing out a new one called MainMenu, it seems to work very well, does many more things than Cocktail, but it works as a menu item in the top menu bar. Dr. Smoke will tell you this can be dangerous, but I've had no problems so far. And it's FREE!

Maintenance scripts are a Unix thing and used to be called cron, too much detail to go into here but there are daily, weekly and monthly scripts set to run at specific times automatically but this only happens if you leave your Mac on all the time and never put it to sleep or restart. So third party software is usually used to make sure they get done. In Cocktail you can set it to do it at a specific times.

Deleting caches can be one of the most important maintenance things you can do and would more properly be called a repair. Caches are little bits of information stored by the operating system, and for each individual program, of things you do often, this makes everything run faster, but because they are constantly being written and read they are very vulnerable to corruption. Once corrupted they can cause all kinds of weird problems. If your system starts slowing down or doing odd things, or your disk says it's suddenly full and you know you should have more disk space, delete caches through Cocktail first.

For more info check at the X Labs web site for Dr. Smoke's free FAQS:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintainingmacosx.html

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html