3/18/2023 0 Comments Diskwarrior 5 review best priceI found DiskWarrior after looking for a way to sort out a corrupted file system on an attached Firewire Drobo array used for Time Machine backups of several computers. (And I haven't even mentioned that it comes on a bootable USB drive, that you can plug in and use to rebuild a damaged main hard disk on a Mac that won't even boot, using the Mac's 'recovery boot mode'.) So if, like me, you gulp when you see the price of this package, buy it anyway: it is very probably the best tool you'll ever own for rebuilding damaged directories on a Mac. In other words, DW has retrieved all my data, even though I was asking it to rebuild a type of drive it wasn't really designed for. (I contacted the fast, helpful and friendly DW support team by email, and they confirmed that this is was, indeed, the problem.) And then I realised that the reason DW couldn't rebuild the drive was that the Time Machine sparsebundle was on a networked AFP-formatted Time Capsule drive, and that's NOT what DW is designed to fix. And this turned out to be a good idea, because when I told DW to rebuild the sparsebundle, and it started to do so, it threw an error to say it was unable to rebuild the 'drive' and that I should run the program again to have another go. So I copied off all the stuff I needed, and tested it to see that it was OK. But the completely genius bit is that DW lets you copy recovered directories and files from the Preview! Indeed, it recommends that you do this for important data. This allows you to see whether some of the data is still damaged, and decide that you need to try some other method of getting it back before DW makes that difficult or impossible by writing the faulty versions back on to your drive. It seemed to take forever - but then the Time Capsule is a massive 2Tb, and it was almost full of Time Machine data.Īt last, after what felt like an eternity (but was probably only about 10 minutes), DiskWarrior reported it had successfully rebuilt the directories and recovered all the files! At this point, DW does not write anything back on to the drive: rather, it shows you a 'Preview' of the directories and files it will restore. I waited with mounting anxiety for DW to 'rebuild' the damaged sparsebundle. (Note to self: in future, only ever use USB drives, formated as MacOS Extended (Journalled) for Time Machine backups!) Now, remember that DW is really designed for fixing damaged directories on directly connected (i.e internal or USB/firewire/etc external) drives that are formatted as MacOS Extended (Journalled), so my chances seemed slim for fixing a sparsebundle on an AFP-formatted network drive (which is what Time Capsules are). None too confident, I installed and ran the software on an iMac, and pointed it at the damaged Time Machine sparsebundle. I gulped at the price but having no option, I bought a copy. I made the mistake of running Time Machine backups on a network drive (not really a good idea), and the network drive was a Time Capsule (REALLY BAD IDEA!) so when a failed upgrade to MacOS Sierra bricked my Macbook Air, I found to my horror that the Time Machine backup was empty, even though the Time Capsule reported that it contained a large amount of data.Ī knowledgeable friend recommended DW as the best chance of recovering the important data.
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