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MacFixIt Extras

Total Recall's DiskEssentials: a progress report December 1, 1997

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DiskEssentials is a disk repair and recovery utility - a competitor for Norton Utilities. DiskEssentials 1.1 has now been shipping for a couple of weeks. DiskEssentials 1.0.x had numerous problems that culminated in the temporary withdrawal of the product. Since the release of version 1.1, reader email has been very quiet on DiskEssentials. I take this as a positive sign. The only recent email I have received are two reports indicating the DiskEssentials was able to detect and fix problems that Norton missed. I had the opportunity to test out DiskEssentials over the holiday week-end. I first tried DiskRX. It took a lot longer than a typical Norton scan, but seemed more thorough in what it was examining. It spotted several problems not reported by Norton Disk Doctor. It claimed to fix all of them. While I cannot be sure whether these problems really needed fixing (as I had not been having problems with the drive), I can report that the drive worked fine after the repairs were done. I next tried Undo Delete from the Data Recovery Toolkit. It listed hundreds of deleted files as available on the just-repaired drive. I selected several files and they were all recovered fully. Especially note-worthy: the number of files reported as available to undelete increased dramatically after repairing the disk. This is one tangible bit of evidence that the repairs had some benefit. Coincidentally, I had an opportunity to give DiskEssentials a serious work-out during my testing: one of my SyQuest cartridges went belly-up and would not mount. Neither Norton Disk Doctor nor DiskEssentials' DiskRX could repair it. Finally, I decided to give DiskEssentials' Emergency Data Recovery a chance. There were 3520 files on the cartridge. DiskEssentials recovered all of them! In almost all cases, the recovered files were in their original folder location with their custom icons intact. I was impressed. I did not try Norton Utilities for this recovery, so I cannot say how it would have done. One problem: DiskRX would not run on my PowerBook 3400. It would either simply fail to launch or precipitate a freeze. It ran fine on my 7500 however (which is what I used for the above tests). Both Macs were running Mac OS 8. Total Recall states that "new features such as DiskMinder, HFS Plus compatibility, defrag/optimization, and a bootable CD are coming soon." Some of these features are late in arriving, as they were originally promised to be included in version 1.1. Still, these updates will be free to registered users, as part of Total Recall's "Maintenance Pack" policy. [Note: Total Recall is an advertiser on MacFixIt. However, editorial content of MacFixIt is always independent of advertising considerations.]

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