Which utility program likes FCP?

I was advised way back to get Disk Warrior utility program to optimize/trouble-shoot disks - if I have FCP. Is this still the prevailing advice? What about Norton?

Thanks for your help.

- D

Nortons and FCP dont get along. Use Disk Warrior. Available in the lafcpug store for a discount.

Disk Warrior

Michael Horton
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Hi.

Norton!!!!???
Never, Norton is the "Knowned Virus" for OSX.
TechTool is another utility program that does the job but i'm not sure about it.
Disk Warrior, yes.

Rui Barros
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I do fine with Disk Warrior and Disk Utility.

Kevin Monahan
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This is where I raise my hand and ask which problems do y'all think you're curing with Disk Warrior?

We irregularly go through Disk Utilities (from a CD boot) and the three "Periodic" tools and are reasonably careful not to fill up our disks and that's been it for years.

The machines are used intensely each business day and don't appear to be misbehaving. One machine throws around 8-bit uncompressed NTSC clips for our reels and another does oddball utility jobs and interface tasks for the HiDef clients.

I would have gotten the phone call.....

Koz

Disk Warrior fixes directory damage among other things. It is directory damage that mucks up the works. For an explanation on what Disk warrior does and what is directory damage go here

[www.alsoft.com]

Michael Horton
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<<<It is directory damage that mucks up the works. >>>

I know what it does and I know the problems it cures. This is the same process that the heavy UNIX people do to put a very badly confused machines back in fighting trim--only they do it manually with enough command line typing to fill a slim verse of fine poetry. I further agree that scrambling a directory structure can cause all sorts of problems.

I have a license for Disk Warrier.

However, I've only used it once and pretty much just to see what it did and how it worked. I didn't cure anything with it or increase my performance or stability. We're up to seven machines between three building--most very actively used--and have never experienced the desire to Warriorize any of them.

Reading between the lines of the original post (rough to do with only one line), "What is a utility I can use on a regular basis to make sure I never have a drive problem ever."

You can certainly Warriorize your drives on a regular basis if that makes you feel good, but, in my opinion, you're just as far ahead leaving it in its package on the shelf and execute the Disk and Periodic Utilities and don't fill anything up.

The way Disk Warrior works requires a complete abandonment of the original disk structure and reconstruction and replacement. It's thorough, but it takes a while and if you have any environment problems during that time, you can have very bad data damage. They don't mention that very often in the ads. That and it only works really well when there is plenty of room to execute--see: don't fill up your drives.

I suspect also that since no software package is perfect and every damage is different, only a very teensy percentage of the people who have damage gain any benefit.

We need to be careful not to fall into the "Everybody Knows" camp and do more work than we need.

Koz

I have to agree with Koz. I posted an identical question about utilities recently, and since then I have followed his advice and have used the built in utilities, and Terminal commands (since my FCP bay is at home, and I don't like sleeping with computers on) for my two Macs.

So, thanks, Koz, if I didn't tell you before.

Norton was a great utility for de-fragging on OS 9 when booted up from their disk, but would totally screw things up if installed.

This might be a good topic for Mike to put on the Faq Ranch.

Cameron Young

I agree and disagree with Koz.

On one hand, if you're working with external drives, especially FireWire drives, my opinion is that you cannot afford *not* to have a copy of DiskWarrior around.

On the other hand, overuse of utilities like DiskWarrior can actually worsen the stability of your system. Several months ago we had people coming in here saying they used DiskWarrior and Repair Permissions every single day. All of us were pretty horrified by that.

I don't use DiskWarrior more than once every three or four months, unless there's a problem.

However, there are some disk issues that no other utility can fix. For example, DiskWarrior is the only thing I've seen that can occasionall "see" a drive that refuses to mount. The drive would show up in DiskWarrior's list of connected drives, while remaining invisible to Disk Utility and System Profiler. Whereas Disk Utility is helpless in that situation.


www.derekmok.com

Since OSX defragging is a non issue and don't know anyone who is actually doing any de-fragging.

As for little or no benefit with Disk Warrior, that entirely depends on your problem. It's not going to cure a corrupt file unless that file is corrupt due to a directory issue. Most of us who are not real tech savvy use Disk Warrior when we can't figure out what is going on. So it becomes hit or miss if it works or not.

Michael Horton
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Note to r.daniel:

So there in one shot you have the crowning glory of this forum. Several people with clear, but slightly different takes on the same idea. We may not have completely answered the question, but I bet there's enough information in there to get you to where you want to go.

I gotta lie down now.

Koz

Quote
Since OSX defragging is a non issue and don't know anyone who is actually doing any de-fragging.

I do it! I occasionally perform this on external drives when I run into rare odd capture issues or feel drive response is sluggish. But I've discovered if you're going to use, say, TechTool 4.x to defrag files and/or disk fragments ) not to use DW efore TT because I suspect they don't like eachother. If you DW, TT will come along and trash DW's work. I've seen that. Start with TT, optimize a drive, straighten out the pesky little media fragments, then rebuild the directory with DW, which will be derived from the defragged file list.

De-fragging is much less of an issue, but it's still useful. And you should mantain that 10% overhead when doing this.

Of course, to defrag files you also drag-copy them from one disk to another if you have a spare available, which naturally concatenates fragmented files back to their continuous forms as part of the copy process. Then you can zero out the source drive and wipe out disk frgaments.

- Loren
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Well, according to Apple it's a bit of a waste of time and carries little if any benefit.

[docs.info.apple.com]

Michael Horton
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I use cocktail and diskwarrior.