Rating: 
Summary: Lifesaver
Review: Diskwarrior is an essential utility for Mac OS X. I don't even wait til applications start quitting unexpectedly to use Diskwarrior. I even leave my Diskwarrior CD in the CD drive. I do a restart with the Diskwarrior CD and let it do it's thing to keep the directories in tip top shape as I start my day. After awhile, this becomes second nature..like brushing your teeth.
Rating: 
Summary: dental floss for your Macintosh
Review: Diskwarrior is an essential utility for Mac OS X. I don't even wait til applications start quitting unexpectedly to use Diskwarrior. I even leave my Diskwarrior CD in the CD drive. I do a restart with the Diskwarrior CD and let it do it's thing to keep the directories in tip top shape as I start my day. After awhile, this becomes second nature..like brushing your teeth.
Rating:
Summary: If you own a Mac, you should own this software.
Review: Everybody uses their mac for different things, but this is one piece of software that should be on absolutely everyone's Mac. DiskWarrior is a great program that has helped me out of a jam a couple times. Once, in the middle of a project, my Mac locked up and then wouldn't let me log back in completely. Needless to say, I was a little concerned, since I had a deadline looming. I ran down to the local Apple store and paid too much (Amazon's price is great! Better than you'll get at Apple's stores!) and ran it, nervously thinking it'd never work. After a semi-slow boot to CD, the DiskWarrior interface came up and prompted me for my password. I entered it, clicked on "Rebuild", and prayed. In about 5 minutes, DiskWarrior had informed me that it had found errors and fixed them, and had rebuilt my directory. I half expected to lose some work or files, but I clicked on "Replace". Then I rebooted, crossing my fingers. It worked. And not only did it work, it worked wonderfully. My Mac had booted up faster than I remembered it booting. I logged in -- again, no problems, -- and was able to pick up exactly where I left off before the crash. DiskWarrior has given me some reassurance. It's not the safety net that a full drive backup is, but I don't need to worry about something going horribly awry.
And, it's more than just a disaster recovery application. You can schedule periodic tests of your drive(s), and it will alert you if anything has gone wrong. So, mine checks hourly and I have some additional peace of mind. Furthermore, you don't need to be a gearhead to get this to work. I don't want to spend hours making software work, and this is so simple and intuitive out of the box. It's great for infrequent maintenance, too. It will clean up directory structures that have gotten messed up, and everything seems to run a little smoother. Bear in mind that a lot of files seem to bog this down. It takes about five minutes to run a full test on my main hard drive, but my second storage drive, with less (but larger) files usually gets done in about a minute and a half. But, really, that's peanuts when you consider that you could spend all day reformatting and reinstalling, or recovering from a backup and redoing lost work. Alsoft has made a wonderful product and I don't regret anything -- except that I could have gotten it cheaper if I'd bought it through Amazon. If you own a Mac, you really should get this if you don't have it already. Its one success in my case more than paid for its cost, had I been forced to start from scratch.
Rating: 
Summary: Defective product
Review: I bought it Diskwarrior 3.0 after reading several reviews, what they don't tell you is that 3.0 does not work with 10.3, and that after you get it, you will have to to call the company and pay an additional $20 for a working product (3.01).
Rating:
Summary: Works Great (and a manual is barely required)
Review: I had some 30 overlapped files (thanks to MSN) on my 10.2 OS G4. The most recent Techtool 4 couldn't do a thing. And the recommendations I saw on the net to run older versions of First Aid didn't work either. My computer was killing itself due to all these files sharing the same space. DiskWarrior worked. Period. A few caveats, however. The PDF manual states quite clearly that you should first run DiskWarrior directly from the CD ROM before doing other things - such as installing the program on your own hard drive. It would have been nice to have that in writing. The running of the program is simple and consists of, I believe, two mouse clicks. What manual do you need to do that? The program does what it does and it requires very few acts on the part of the user. But still, a printed manual would have been good. A mere 25 page leaflet would have been more than sufficient. Seems like this wouldn't add too much to the production cost of the software. The big drawback here is time. DiskWarrior is sloooow. The start up takes several minutes and the maintenance itself, at least in my situation, took some five hours. I've never had a disk utility take so long to fix a problem. In any case, if you've got to fix your computer and you're using this software, don't plan on cheerily getting back to your computer in just a few minutes. This is the second version of DiskWarrior I've owned. I had Vers. 1.0 which seemed to work, but it never saved my can. It always seemed that either Norton or Techtool could take care of almost any problem that DiskWarrior could. But not this time with OS X. I'm sure others have had differenct experiences, but this is still a good program. It's not going to fix all problems (no utility can), but it just might save your computer if it specifically has disk directory problems. Ultimately, you really do need to have at least two utilities. One of them is either Norton or Techtool. The other is DiskWarrior.
Rating:
Summary: Works Great (and a manual is barely required)
Review: I had some 30 overlapped files (thanks to MSN) on my 10.2 OS G4. The most recent Techtool 4 couldn't do a thing. And the recommendations I saw on the net to run older versions of First Aid didn't work either. My computer was killing itself due to all these files sharing the same space. DiskWarrior worked. Period. A few caveats, however. The PDF manual states quite clearly that you should first run DiskWarrior directly from the CD ROM before doing other things - such as installing the program on your own hard drive. It would have been nice to have that in writing. The running of the program is simple and consists of, I believe, two mouse clicks. What manual do you need to do that? The program does what it does and it requires very few acts on the part of the user. But still, a printed manual would have been good. A mere 25 page leaflet would have been more than sufficient. Seems like this wouldn't add too much to the production cost of the software. The big drawback here is time. DiskWarrior is sloooow. The start up takes several minutes and the maintenance itself, at least in my situation, took some five hours. I've never had a disk utility take so long to fix a problem. In any case, if you've got to fix your computer and you're using this software, don't plan on cheerily getting back to your computer in just a few minutes. This is the second version of DiskWarrior I've owned. I had Vers. 1.0 which seemed to work, but it never saved my can. It always seemed that either Norton or Techtool could take care of almost any problem that DiskWarrior could. But not this time with OS X. I'm sure others have had differenct experiences, but this is still a good program. It's not going to fix all problems (no utility can), but it just might save your computer if it specifically has disk directory problems. Ultimately, you really do need to have at least two utilities. One of them is either Norton or Techtool. The other is DiskWarrior.
Rating:
Summary: Bad docs, Bad discs, Bad experience
Review: I wish I could be one of those people giving DiskWarrior 5 stars and saying "it saved my keester!" Unfortunately, my case is more "I'm still hosed...and now I'm out a hundred bucks!" The first annoyance was that the DiskWarrior CD itself has been reproduced so cheaply (blue dye, like a 10-cent blank CDR for home burning use) that my G4 wouldn't recognize it. "Yeah, those Phillips superdrives are touchy," says tech support. Mind you, the drive has never rejected any OTHER disc I've tried. And despite the hundred dollar price tag, there are no printed docs with the disc - just a PDF manual. You know, the kind you could read IF your computer was working. Of course, if it was working you wouldn't need DiskWarrior, would you? In the PDF manual, it says you can make an additional startup disc (in this case to boot into OS 9 instead of the default OS X)...but it doesn't say HOW to do this, or even hint at it. It's entirely unintuitive, and I needed two phonecalls to tech support AND considerable knowledge of Macs to make such a disc. Not that it helped. Maybe my problem is more than just a bad directory - but I don't think so. So far, DiskWarrior hasn't accomplished anything. I'd call tech support for help, but they keep only banker's hours (M-F and out the door by 5 central). Considering the markup on this disc-without-manual, you'd think they could afford decent tech support. I've heard enough good things about DiskWarrior to think it must be doing something for somebody. But for me, the program is overpriced, under documented and a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Bad docs, Bad discs, Bad experience
Review: I wish I could be one of those people giving DiskWarrior 5 stars and saying "it saved my keester!" Unfortunately, my case is more "I'm still hosed...and now I'm out a hundred bucks!" The first annoyance was that the DiskWarrior CD itself has been reproduced so cheaply (blue dye, like a 10-cent blank CDR for home burning use) that my G4 wouldn't recognize it. "Yeah, those Phillips superdrives are touchy," says tech support. Mind you, the drive has never rejected any OTHER disc I've tried. And despite the hundred dollar price tag, there are no printed docs with the disc - just a PDF manual. You know, the kind you could read IF your computer was working. Of course, if it was working you wouldn't need DiskWarrior, would you? In the PDF manual, it says you can make an additional startup disc (in this case to boot into OS 9 instead of the default OS X)...but it doesn't say HOW to do this, or even hint at it. It's entirely unintuitive, and I needed two phonecalls to tech support AND considerable knowledge of Macs to make such a disc. Not that it helped. Maybe my problem is more than just a bad directory - but I don't think so. So far, DiskWarrior hasn't accomplished anything. I'd call tech support for help, but they keep only banker's hours (M-F and out the door by 5 central). Considering the markup on this disc-without-manual, you'd think they could afford decent tech support. I've heard enough good things about DiskWarrior to think it must be doing something for somebody. But for me, the program is overpriced, under documented and a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Bad docs, Bad discs, Bad experience
Review: I wish I could be one of those people giving DiskWarrior 5 stars and saying "it saved my keester!" Unfortunately, my case is more "I'm still hosed...and now I'm out a hundred bucks!" The first annoyance was that the DiskWarrior CD itself has been reproduced so cheaply (blue dye, like a 10-cent blank CDR for home burning use) that my G4 wouldn't recognize it. "Yeah, those Phillips superdrives are touchy," says tech support. Mind you, the drive has never rejected any OTHER disc I've tried. And despite the hundred dollar price tag, there are no printed docs with the disc - just a PDF manual. You know, the kind you could read IF your computer was working. Of course, if it was working you wouldn't need DiskWarrior, would you? In the PDF manual, it says you can make an additional startup disc (in this case to boot into OS 9 instead of the default OS X)...but it doesn't say HOW to do this, or even hint at it. It's entirely unintuitive, and I needed two phonecalls to tech support AND considerable knowledge of Macs to make such a disc. Not that it helped. Maybe my problem is more than just a bad directory - but I don't think so. So far, DiskWarrior hasn't accomplished anything. I'd call tech support for help, but they keep only banker's hours (M-F and out the door by 5 central). Considering the markup on this disc-without-manual, you'd think they could afford decent tech support. I've heard enough good things about DiskWarrior to think it must be doing something for somebody. But for me, the program is overpriced, under documented and a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Disk Warrior defeated 552 overlap extent allocation erros
Review: I'm not the kind (unfortunately) to always share my experiences, good or bad, with products. However, I must say that Disk Warrior is the BEST. My iBook had crashed, losing a year of research, two vacations' worth of pictures, etc. etc. [I'll never not backup again]. Disk First Aid and Apple's help desk were useless. I took it to professional data recovery people, who said that they'd charge me $600 whether or not they saved a damn thing. DiskWarrior for OSX did what the others couldn't -- it rebuilt my drive, and I got back every single file, zero loss. This product is truly miraculous!
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