DiskWarrior:
DiskWarrior is the only program where there is never a risk of losing directory data and thus never a risk of losing access to your files.
Only DiskWarrior has all of these features:
* Uses directory data to quickly rebuild the directory structure
* Eliminates risk of losing access to files * other disk "repair" utilities attempt to fix the directory by patching the directory structure and risk deleting sections of the directory
* Scavenges directory to find all salvageable file and folder data, even data contained in damaged nodes
* Eliminates unseen directory errors, preventing minor directory errors from escalating into major problems
* Recovers lost files and folders
* Optimizes directory for maximum directory performance, speeding up overall disk performance
* Monitors drive hardware for potential drive failure
* Verification of replacement directory ensures data integrity
* Comparison of original directory with replacement directory tells you which files and folders may have been affected by directory damage
* Patented preview feature to view what the disk will look like after the directory is rebuilt, allowing you to view files and folders before any directory changes are written to disk
* Repairs damaged boot blocks and blesses the system folder to ensure that the computer will start from the repaired disk
* Checks custom icon files for corruption, eliminating a common cause of system crashes
* Repairs problems with wrapper volume System files caused when HFS Plus disks are initialized under Mac OS 9.0 - 9.0.4
* Safely permits interruptions of any kind, including power outages
* Advanced "Verify Reads and Writes" technology protects your data
* Supports bad block sparing software
* Supports file journaling (Mac OS X 10.2.2 or later)
Macaroni
Macaroni is a utility which automates Mac OS X system maintenance tasks. It ensures that these tasks are run on a regular schedule (or as close as possible) regardless of when your Mac is or isn't turned on.
When you install Macaroni, it has five standard maintenance jobs, described below. You can also add your own custom maintenance jobs. The standard Macaroni maintenance jobs are:
*Daily Unix maintenance: Mainly concerned with cleaning up old temporary files created by the system and then left in place, such as those found in Unix's "tmp" directories. This job also backs up the Netinfo database, and does several other things such as maintaining system log files and restarting the system log. Macaroni's version of this job additionally cleans up old printer spool files left behind by CUPS, old Mac OS X installer logs, and old crash logs (if any), and provides more information about what it is doing and how much space has been saved.
Daily maintenance usually takes just one or two minutes to run. This job does not require any configuration.
*Weekly Unix maintenance: Does most of its work in rebuilding two system databases, the "locate" database used for fast file searches (with Unix's "locate" command or Mac OS X tools like Locator), and the "whatis" database used when searching documentation. Also does the same log-file and system-log maintenance as the daily maintenance job.
Weekly maintenance can take several minutes. The time varies depending on how many files are on your hard drive. On my Mac it takes about 8 minutes, with about 22GB used on the disk. This job does not require any configuration.
*Monthly Unix maintenance: The least critical of all maintenance done by Macaroni, this job manages log files and the system log, and also prints login accounting information for the past month.
Monthly maintenance generally takes under a minute to run. This job does not require any configuration.
* Mac OS X Repair Permissions: Runs the Mac OS X "repair permissions" process. Problems with Unix-style permissions can cause a variety of sometimes-puzzling problems on Mac OS X, so it's useful to fix things up once in a while to keep your Mac running smoothly. This is the same maintenance that you could run using Mac OS X's Disk Utility. In fact, Macaroni uses the command-line version of Disk Utility to do this repair. The only difference between using Macaroni to do this and using Disk Utility is that Macaroni runs the repair automatically, on a regular schedule.
Permission repair can take a while-- perhaps as long as 10-20 minutes. This job does not require any configuration.
* Mac OS X Remove Localized Files: Mac OS X and many Mac OS X applications include files that allow them to be used by people who speak different languages. Even if you choose not to install "extra" languages, your Mac usually has several alternate languages available. And every time you install or update an application, you get more of them. For example, the iTunes 4.0 installer includes Chinese (both Taiwan and mainland), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish versions.
If you don't speak some of those languages, you'll never use those files (and never miss them), so you can safely remove them and save disk space. There are other applications that can do this, but to be really useful you'll need to run them again every time you install a new application or update Mac OS X.
These files can take more space than you might guess. The first time I ran this job on my Mac, I saved 322MB of files I was never going to use anyway. With that space I could import a half-dozen of my CDs into iTunes and not be using any more disk space than when I started.
Removing localized files can take a while, mostly taken up in looking for the files, and will take longer on larger drives. For reference it akes about 10-12 minutes on a drive with about 22GB used. This job requires that you configure it, so that you can tell it which languages you want to remove.
