{"id":7104,"date":"2013-03-14T15:31:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T20:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=7104"},"modified":"2013-03-14T16:28:50","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T21:28:50","slug":"do-you-need-a-third-party-disk-utility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/14\/do-you-need-a-third-party-disk-utility\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Need a Third-Party Disk Utility?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macworld.com\/article\/2030516\/do-you-need-a-third-party-disk-utility-.html\">Joe Kissell<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.macworld.com\/article\/2030516\/do-you-need-a-third-party-disk-utility-.html\"><p>Lately I&rsquo;ve noticed something curious: While I used to turn to such utilities every few months, I haven&rsquo;t had to do so in a long time&mdash;certainly not in the past couple of years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that I&rsquo;m not alone in this; disk errors beyond the purview of Disk Utility seem to have declined sharply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bynkii.com\/archives\/2013\/03\/on_dedicated_disk_utilities.html\">John C. Welch<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.bynkii.com\/archives\/2013\/03\/on_dedicated_disk_utilities.html\"><p>So I think a huge reason why people don't worry about dedicated disk utilities anymore is that backing up has become such a literally thoughtless process, a hard drive crash is no longer the horrifying event it used to be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I used to swear by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alsoft.com\/diskwarrior\/\">DiskWarrior<\/a>, but it&rsquo;s now been a long time since I&rsquo;ve used it. I used to run it periodically to optimize my volume&rsquo;s catalogs, which really did speed things up, and several times it saved drives that had become completely unusable. Nowadays, I can imagine using it to get at very recently modified files if my drive became inaccessible, but I would no longer plan on resuming use of the repaired drive. Instead, I would erase it (or replace it) and restore from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shirt-pocket.com\/SuperDuper\/SuperDuperDescription.html\">SuperDuper!<\/a> clone.<\/p>\n<p>Fragmentation can still be a problem for large files such as an Aperture database or Spotlight index, which can accumulate thousands of fragments. SSDs reduce the effects of fragmentation, but I still find it helpful to defragment certain problem files using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coriolis-systems.com\/iDefrag.php\">iDefrag<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I also continue to find bad blocks on my drives, which can cause hangs and lead to damaged files. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prosofteng.com\/products\/drive_genius.php\">Drive Genius<\/a>&rsquo;s Scan feature is the best way that I know to detect them.<\/p>\n<p>Lastly, it&rsquo;s alarming just how many disk problems my customers encounter. <a href=\"http:\/\/c-command.com\/spamsieve\/\">SpamSieve<\/a> now includes various diagnostics to detect and fix incorrect permissions and corrupt files. It also validates parts of its own bundle and advises the user to download a fresh copy if components are missing or damaged. Seeing how often this can happen, it&rsquo;s a wonder that anything on the Mac works.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Kissell: Lately I&rsquo;ve noticed something curious: While I used to turn to such utilities every few months, I haven&rsquo;t had to do so in a long time&mdash;certainly not in the past couple of years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that I&rsquo;m not alone in this; disk errors beyond the purview of Disk Utility seem to have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[146,366,367,368,30,32,372,174,369],"class_list":["post-7104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-backup","tag-diskwarrior","tag-drivegenius","tag-idefrag","tag-mac","tag-macapp","tag-spamsieve","tag-storage","tag-superduper"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7104"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7121,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7104\/revisions\/7121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}