[Ti] SpeedTools vs. Retrospect vs DiskWarrior

[Kynan Shook]

I've never seen SpeedTools before, but from what I can tell by their 
website, the biggest difference is that SpeedTools isn't very useful, 
which is probably the biggest reason why it was bundled.  Bundled 
utilities never seem to be very good (well, I'll exclude Retrospect; 
that seems to be rather popular, after all-I'm more referring to 
formatting utilities and such).  The only repair utility they include 
is the "Media Scanner" portion, which finds bad blocks.  While this can 
be nice, bad blocks on a hard drive mean you should replace the drive; 
once it starts going bad, it probably won't stop any time soon.  As 
such, it's something that I would never recommend bothering to fix.  
Their "Integrity" portion initially looked like it might do something 
useful, but it doesn't; it just writes a repeating pattern to the disk, 
and then checks to make sure it got written properly.  None of their 
tools will do anything remotely resembling directory repair.

Anyway, DiskWarrior will actually fix a corrupted directory.  I have 
used it many, many times to recover a drive that can't be mounted in 
any computer.  Usually I can get back 100% of the data.  The preview 
feature is great too; you can not only check the drive after the 
repairs have been done to make sure that your important data is still 
around, but if the disk is so badly damaged that it can't be repaired 
(or even if there is some minor hardware damage), you can retrieve all 
your data off the preview disk.

DiskWarrior is by far the best disk utility out there; Micromat has 
some interesting utilities, but they also aren't always useful.  Norton 
can also help out a lot too, but it is very well known for causing more 
problems than it fixes.  One of the best features of Norton 5 was that 
it removed their buggy CrashGuard program.  The current OS X version is 
still fairly well-known for causing kernel panics.  And I know a number 
of people that have attempted repair with Norton, and instead lost all 
their data because it messed something up.

My final word: go buy DiskWarrior if you don't have it already.  Run it 
every few months.  And if you frequently see hundreds and hundreds of 
errors (which might be normal the *first* time you run it, but not 
*every* time), you might have bad RAM...  It's an interesting way to 
test, but it often reveals problems that might be harder to track down.

Sambouka <sambouka at mac.com> writes:
> I received SpeedTools and Retrospect BACKUP CDS with my new external
> HD. Anyone has any experience with any of them. How is SpeedTools
> different than Diskwarrior?