Disk Warrior 5 - Mac (select) Version 5 Edition

So here's the story... I had a Iomega passport external hard drive that I used as a time machine backup maybe 5 years ago, and I kept meaning to back it up to a new external HD with it's own power source (because those are more reliable). I had heard from a few people that their HD had crashed and I thought well maybe they had done something stupid like not eject the disk before unplugging it or had tons of questionable material on the drive to begin with. Whatever the case maybe, I thought it's never going to happen to me. Anyway I finally remembered and learned how to back up a old time machine backup from an old drive to a new drive this week and got that old drive out. I remembered taking something off the drive last year and everything was fine so I figured no problem. And then it happened! I had gotten an error that I have never seen before! "OS X can't repair the disk 'My name Backup' you can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can". I thought "oh crap". Well at least the error said I could copy the files but ... it turned out that I couldn't! I only saw Backups.backupdb folder that was empty even though the drive was full! I thought I can fix this I am have watched enough youtube videos on computers to feel geeky. I opened terminal thinking I could find a back door solution, I couldn't. I opened Mac utilities to run first aid and see if it would repair permissions, no luck, instead I got an error that said invalid number of keys. And I thought to myself well if you know there there is the wrong number of keys then just fix it! Anyway I was going to give up on the drive because I was pretty sure that I had backed up all the important files to some other drive but I still had my doubts. I had heard of disk warrior but again I never thought I would need it so didn't no much about it. I went to the website and I was even more disappointed because it looked like they had not updated the site since the 90's, so I felt that maybe the company had gone out of business or something and I was worried that I was going to by some really antiquated software even though it said that is supported El Capitan (OS X 10.11). So I did what everyone does and looked at amazon reviews and looked at the 1 and 2 stars to see why people hated it and the comments did scare me a little but I thought that maybe their problem was not the same as mine and software can only do what it is programed to do, it doesn't fix the worlds problems. So even though it had some bad reviews out there, I was desperate, and I had never heard of some of the other recovery software for Macs like "data rescue" that were getting the equal number of stars as Disk Warrior. So although those might have been good alternative and slightly less expensive I didn't want to go a little cheaper and realize it didn't work because I wasn't going to buy another recovery software and waist more money on getting data that I wasn't sure was worth it. So I go the Disk Warrior USB stick today May 2016 and I installed it and it just worked! That Backups folder was no longer empty and I am copying the files from the old drive to a new one as I write this review. So in Summary 1) DiskWarrior's website may look old but the software isn't. 2) It worked by getting the files I needed when disk utility wouldn't help me out 3) Always back up your files, never have just one place with all your files

Still the best general disk maintenance tool for Mac users. Works just as well for your internal HD as well as externals & portable drives using both USB & Firewire. Solved problems I had been wasting time on for months, wish I'd thought of trying DW sooner. All my externals are now running properly again & data corrupted by fragmentation now usable. DW had always been a go-to utility in the PPC days and is even easier to use. Now comes installed on a USB flash device which you can boot your Mac from to run the internal drive maintenance operations. It was easy to update the drive tool to 10.11 El Crapitan using a patch at the Alsoft website, and because the drive is re-writeable one should be able to change that boot OS to use with other machines (haven't tried it yet but I'll be surprised if not). So a hundred bucks well spent. Terabite-plus external drives now go for forty bucks, but how much is the data you save on them worth? As with my PPC back then I'm now more confident in knowing that my Intel-era Mac produced data will be more safely stored. Who burns discs anymore? It's all saved to externals or flash sticks. Consider this insurance that they'll keep working.

Like: promising. don't like: Limited instructions, no trouble shooting, only one page manual. This product is set up for earlier OS's but claims it can be used with 10.7 or later. However, following instructions, when I get to Terminal after reboot properly, it says type /Volumes/DW/go and hit enter. it fails to find this DW. and I'm stuck. This app is built and released in 2015, for older versions of Mac OS than I have. I'm using Sierra 10.12.6 and instructions jump forward for later versions, and are not complete. UPDATE: got it working, by not following the instructions, which are not complete enough. Here is what worked for me: Shut off the Mac. Connect Apple keyboard to one of the rear USB connectors. Not front or my USB3 card. Hold down command R during startup. Access terminal as described in instructions from helper left off screen and not any window that opens, choose terminal. Then insert disc Warrior key fob into another of the rear USB inputs. Type /Volumes/DW/go in Terminal. Diskwarrior came up fine. It fixed both SSD drives. Both directories were at level 6 of 10, now both at 10., checked files, found several, not sure they are fixed, checked hardware. Quit DiskWarrior, choose correct disk to boot from. Everything is good now. no longer slow to load pages in browsers.

Worst software product I've purchased in years. Nothing more than a collection of common utilities that can be sourced for free elsewhere. No magic here.

My aging Mac Mini experienced a HDD failing status after 12 years of service, rendering the machine unbootable. Standard Disk Utility recovery mode was unable to salvage the drive. My previous copy of DiskWarrior was too out of date to be of use. Trusting the quality, I rolled the dice on an upgrade. It took nine hours total for DiskWarrior to salvage a preview image of data that could potentially be recovered. With time and patience I was able to recover some crucial files I had failed to backup. Only one file was not able to be recovered. In future I'll give the old drive another pass to try to salvage more data, but as is DiskWarrior saved me from my lackadaisical personal backup schedule. Yes an oddity in 2024 with online storage services, but I purchased this final upgradable model Mac Mini for a reason. I do hope Alsoft will continue to create excellent tools for future Mac users.

This product identified my disk issue (on an external USB disk) but whenever I run the fix process, the computer restarts "due to a problem". Given I'm not fixing the boot disk, this is unexpected. I suspect the program is maxing out the 16GB of RAM on the Mac Mini and then crashing, but I don't have proof of that. When I try to boot from the USB drive to run the disk fix, it just hangs the computer at the gray Apple logo (after selecting the USB key as the boot device by holding option). There's an update, but it won't install on the USB key, despite walking through the prompted process. Basically, this doesn't work. At least on my Mac Mini, which isn't exactly bleeding edge new. It's a 2012 Intel a major OS revision back. This would be of limited use on a newer Mac for various reasons. 1) it can't do Apple File System drives 2) You're supposed to plug it straight into the Mac, but it's not USB C 3) It probably can't do M1 CPU based systems. Basically this is an expensive product in need of a significant update that may be your savior, or it may be useless, but you're going to need to pay full price (non refundable) to find out.

Didn't resolve the issue I purchased it for. Will try again.

i've used Disk Warrior on my Mac - various OS versions - and this is the best utility program / optimizer that i can find. Amazon's price makes this purchase out of necessity, and much more pleasant transaction. i'd definitely go to Amazon to purchase any future versions. Due to the way that DW releases updates [requiring the owner to SAVE the original disc, which becomes the basis for creating a new disk which would include the new format / utility computer codes to enable it to work. This is a very difficult process [for me, at least] because it merges the info on the original disk with the update, and based on that .. voila, a new disk must be created. i'd much rather buy a crisp clean disk - even though the newer MacBookPro laptops lack an optical drive. Amazon has external CD-R/RW drives available for sale that work wonderfully with Disk Utility or even Roxio's Toast. Amazon's got me as a customer for the next eon or more ~ thank you for your premier level of service, Amazon! And thanks for carrying Disk Warrior.

I got this to fix some SoftRAID configured external HDD's and it worked a treat for that, so money well spent. It would be nice to see a free upgrade that also handles Apple's newer APFS disks for total peace of mind.

Tous les avis lus sont crédibles. Sur de vieux DD extérieurs très (trop) utilisés il est clair qu'il y a des problèmes mécaniques...DiskWarrior répare ce qu'il peut lire (beaucoup si ce n'est tout, c'est clair !). À nous de les sauvegarder ensuite sur un bon disque. Les réparations éventuelles sont indiquées...à chaque réparation du même DD le nombre de problème NE DOIT PAS augmenter ce qui serait, je crois, un signe de fatigue mécanique. Cher, oui, mais incontournable ! Si on n'a qu'un DD interne... c'est FOLIE de s'en passer ! Il est aussi sur une clé USB (pas encore utilisée). fadu

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. A knowledgeable friend recommended DW as the best chance of recovering the important data. I gulped at the price; but having no option, I bought a copy. None too confident, I installed and ran the software on an iMac, and pointed it at the damaged Time Machine sparsebundle... 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). (Note to self: in future, only ever use USB drives, formated as MacOS Extended (Journalled) for Time Machine backups!) I waited with mounting anxiety for DW to 'rebuild' the damaged sparsebundle. It seemed to take forever - but then the Time Capsule is a massive 2Tb, and it was almost full of Time Machine data... At 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. 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. 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. So I copied off all the stuff I needed, and tested it to see that it was OK. 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. I did, but got the same error again. 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. (I contacted the fast, helpful and friendly DW support team by email, and they confirmed that this is was, indeed, the problem.) 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. How's that for awesome? 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. (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'.) Just buy it!

This has saved my files more than once. It's worth its weight in gold.

Software didn't do the job at all. Getting tons of error codes but no actual results. Fair enough, contacted their support and no response after 3 days at all. The software is still basic and there are free opensource solutions available that offer more in dept changes. With Disk Warrior you press a button and it either fixes it or throws errors at you like disk manager.