Is DiskWarrior Losing Relevance?

I’ve been using DiskWarrior since OS X 10.2 and, although it can’t deal with APFS, it is still valuable in recovering ailing HFS+ disks. I did run into an issue a couple of weeks ago when I attempted to use DW to fix an ailing/aged Mac Mini running OS X 10.5.x. DW encountered a new “security issue” on my also aging MacBook Pro running OS X 10.13 and would not run. I contacted Alsoft and one of their tech folks, after examining my Terminal log, suggested that something called ‘csrutil’ had to be disabled in order to run DW. He gave me instructions on disabling it which fixed the issue, but in response to my question about the implications of the disablement, conceded that it probably was compromising a security fix in the last Security Update and suggested future use of DW be limited to a bootable disk key.

crutil is a process used to control System Integrity Protection (SIP) described here: https://support.apple.com/HT204899. I’m not aware of any changes in the most recent Security Update that related to SIP, but it’s essential that you re-enable SIP after you finish using DW. If you need help with that, let us know.

Very possible. Yet Steve Gibson, who thought the usefulness of his Spinright software was less with SSDs says he gets many stories where his Spinrite fixes problems with SSDs. It works at the block level. SSDs are pushing density very high, just as this has become the case with spinning disks, which has increased the chances of some sort of failure. But SSDs might still be overall more reliable.

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DiskWarrior does retain a useful function for me. Of course I can no longer use it to repair the internal drives of the Macs I service — these drives are all SSDs with APFS. They have to be, because MacOS has required APFS to enable OS updates since Mojave, and APFS has been kill-me-now slow on a spinner since it appeared.

However spinning drives are still cheaper than SSDs, and backups don’t need to be fast. All these main-drive internal SSDs are backed up to conventional external hard drives, and I scan and repair the externals with DiskWarrior.

If Apple never finished APFS enough to release the full specs and make DW run everywhere again, I would be sorely disappointed in Apple. But not as much as I was when they killed HyperCard with neglect. That was when ( to borrow a phrase of Lalla the poet ) I started waiting for my love of the Mac to leave me.

I consider it completely unacceptable that Apple hasn’t made Time Machine compatible with APFS. Whoever heard of making a partial adoption of a new file system?

Reportedly, Big Sur supports APFS for Time Machine volumes, but using very different internal mechanisms.

Here are some links about APFS support for the Time Machine in Big Sur:

Apple adds APFS encrypted drive support to iOS 14 and APFS Time Machine backups to macOS Big Sur - 9to5Mac and

Not sure what you mean. Yes, APFS is a PIA, and Time Machine has long been buggy (though it’s come in handy a few times), TM has backed up as before with Mojave and now Catalina.

As for APFS, it’s unconscionable of Apple that even if APFS is a work in progress they haven’t released documentation about what they know so far, and can’t understand why they don’t.

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This is a tad off topic. But the SIS plays havoc with trying to save photoshop files on the startup volume or the volume that houses the ps app. Unless you disable SIS and make the owner able to read/write on that volume-PS will not save any file as the owner or creator of file who does not have permission. So I disabled SIS -made myself (administrator also) the owner of the volume and then restarted and began saving all my ps files again (only sometimes for speed working) to my start up drive. I have not reenabled SIS yet so I don’t know if the permissions stuck with me and the administrator users. After talking to Adobe for about 45 min- I figured this out as they could not.

Apple has released detailed APFS specs. It’s almost 200 pages, I’ve only read some of it.

But I’m not sure if it goes into enough detail for Alsoft to write a reliable repair tool. The part I’ve read so far has lots of very low level detail, without a broad overview of how it all fits together. But perhaps I just haven’t got to that part yet.

HFS and HFS+ were in use for decades, had detailed specs, and Apple engineers would answer questions at WWDC or online. APFS seems much more secretive, and Apple is a more secretive company now.

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Thanks for the link. That document is dated June 22 - less than two months ago.

Hopefully it will be enough information for Alsoft to fill in all the gaps in their knowledge. Now the question is how long it will take to complete APFS capability in Disk Warrior.

It’s my understanding that Alsoft has been working on APFS support based on what information they’ve been able to get, so they probably have a partly-finished implementation in-house that they can finish up now that they have this information.

If we’re lucky, then Alsoft guessed correctly about most of the missing information - this would let them quickly finish up the code and move on to testing. If we’re not lucky, then their guesses were wrong in ways that will require significant changes to what’s been developed so far, meaning a release will take longer.

Yippee! The Cavalry is on the horizon … we’ll all be saved!
“The Lord willin’ and the creeks don’t rise!” :nerd_face:

Wow, talk about a blast from the past. I used to use Disc Warrior religiously years ago (in the PowerBook era), but I know I haven’t used it at all with my Intel-based Macs. And with Classic MacOS, it was essential to have it and also Norton Disc Doctor. I’m not at all sure why disc corruption/file fixing was more of an issue back then (and why you had to run such utilities on a regular basis), but maybe with the various versions of the OS in the last twenty years, it does a better job taking care of those housekeeping chores. Now I’m much more obsessed with having complete data backups, whether they are bootable or not, I don’t want to lose anything at all. So that’s my main weekly and bi-weekly chore.

Remember the old white ambulance icon with the red cross on it that Disk First Aid used to have?!!

I’ve found that Disk Warrior can save Time Machine backups on HFS+ external (spinning disk) drives that Disk Utility refuses to touch. It take several hours, but worth it to save the version archive. Otherwise, it’s wipe, start over, then eventually the TM drive will corrupt at some future point anyway.

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Hi all, I was very pleased to come across this discussion, sadly, though, no relief for that slight feeling of despair - Diskwarrior’s APFS incompatibility seems like a very sad loss - that almost magical app that seemed to do just one thing when rebuilding the startup disk directory really really well.

So, how to “clean up” the startup disk directory now?

I did see a hypothesis that - using, say CCC to clone off then back to the internal HD would defragment the drive and at the same time rearrange the directory. Wonder if that’s right?
Even if so, plainly that’s cumbersome - and its not a quick get out of jail emergency “not booting situation” 30 minute fix that DW was.

So, is our fallback for this awful failure to boot situations now perhaps:-

1: A time machine backup - then clean install OSX and migrate?
[with the side advantage that a clean install used to be considered good Mac health practice, maybe annually or bi annually in days of yore.]

2: maybe a better solution - daily CCC incremental bootable backup and in an emergency you can A: boot and get some work done
then
B: clone back

  • possibly faster than option 1 too.

I wonder how well CCC deals with weekly external disc swops when making incrementally updated bootable backups - so that a pretty recent working OS installation is always available off-site?
I do that with folders etc. using Chronosync, but don’t use CS to make bootable backups. CCC seems more the respected candidate for that.

Ideas welcome
many thanks
Neil B

I OTOH can’t say how many times a CCC backup has saved my bacon - I had a 2014 then a 2017 iMac 5K with 3 TB fusion drives, and somewhere through the years 3 TB fusion drives with boot camp installed could not migrate through the OSes without breaking - and broke repeatedly even after being clean reformatted and restored through Migration Assistant.

It’s only when I moved on to a 2020 iMac with a 4 TB SSD that I found a really stable boot camp environment again.

APFS is more of a work-in-progress than it is a stable file system, and Apple doesn’t have the perseverance of say IBM when it comes to strictly defining the file system, data structures, and program logic.

I agree. I was a Mac consultant for many years, and DW was one of my go-to utilities. It wasn’t the optimization that was most important, it was rebuilding broken directories. DU only repairs them, DW would rebuild them, and did a better job sometimes.

Me too. FMPro became a (poor) substitute.

After 37+ years of working with Macs, my career definitely reached a plateau, and then took off, once I automatically ran DW on every newly backed up drive or/or major system update I ran into! After one of those sessions, DW would reliably “straighten up” and repair, not only the main directory, but, like a local neighborhood street repair – realign all the “houses” (applications, files, folders, caches, Trash, etc.) on the street/drive! The time and debugging frustrations – especially prior to knowledge of a soon to be announced major op sys update from Apple – was painfully wasted time for all concerned. Regretfully, it seems that we are “revisiting” that time of old … without even the benefit of Applejack or even good old AppleWorks. :pensive:

Me too. FMPro became a (poor) substitute.

The the last few versions of FileMaker Pro have been amazing. I’ve used it to design database solutions for large logistics corporation.