Does anyone else use DiskWarrior? I've looked it up through google and there seem to be mixed comments...
I had my fill of the repair-utilities drama with systems 7 to 9. (I may have posted about this a while ago.) OS 9, though, needs the "heavyweight" utilities because Apple's pre-OS X Disk First Aid is a very bad joke. But the two heavyweights I have argue all the time.
I have Norton for 9 and DiskWarrior for 9, and if I run DiskWarrior after running Norton, it reports new problems. Then if I run Norton, it reports Warrior's fixes as needing repairs. Which do I believe?
OS X's Disk Utility is not the weak old First Aid of systems 7 to 9, and I resolved not to bother with the utilities' advertising hype. For five years I have used nothing but the built-in fsck -y, then fsck -fy, and the free fixer-uppers: Onyx, Applejack and what have you.
A Canadian Mac repair shop about 100 klicks from where I live and that has smallish Mac forum slams TechTool Pro; the guy running it says anyone who uses it is nuts. He says he's fed up fixing problems caused by it.
But some "experts" say he's crazy. Other "experts" say to use only DiskWarrior for OS X. Yet other "experts" say DiskWarrior is a turkey, so use TechTool Pro. Since they all claim to be experts, I figure I can, too, and I say a pox on all their houses.
All the free disk utilities use OS X's built-in repair program fsck -fy, and I have
never crashed and burned like OS 9 could and would.
Neither have I ever defragged OS X's system, though I've reloaded it more than a few times when changing partition sizes. And I start from scratch when the systems take a big jump, from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger. If a program uses a package installer, I run Onyx's optimizer, which
isn't a defragger.
I keep it simple, and it works. No more drama.
The irony is that OS X is so much more complicated than 9, but 9 needs the heavyweights.
If 9 screws up and Norton and Warrior scream at each other, I simply trash the thing and drag a new system folder over from a CD, all set up the way I want it. Can't do that with X, but I've never had to.