Yesterday, the latest version of Alsoft's disk utility - called DiskWarrior - has seen the light of day. This version, 4, offers Universal Binary support, significant speed improvements, additional file and folder tests, the ability to repair invalid file permissions, repairs and rebuilds FileVaults, Attribute-B trees and even claims to recover more data from drives having hardware malfunctions than before!

As usual, things look really great at first sight, and although the program is priced at 99.95$, your data safety should always come in first place, so before saying "This is way too expensive!", let's get a little deeper...

DiskWarrior claims to be "the safest, most technologically advanced, most powerful utility to eliminate directory damage available for any computer", and uses a patent-pending technology that rebuilds your damaged data instead of patching it, like other similar programs.

That may sound a little bombastic, but DiskWarrior doesn't claim to do everything related to your file system, since it doesn't even try to solve all the possible problems that may occur with your hard drive.

The most frequent disk problems encountered by Mac OS users are the directory errors, and this is exactly the menace that DiskWarrior fights, solving any problem with the master directory blocks and alternate master directory blocks (HFS), volume headers and alternate volume headers (HFS Plus), as well as catalog trees, volume bitmaps and extents trees.

Leaving the directory damage behind, we get to the physical hardware malfunctions, and the first thing to do when such a problem occurs is pray, meditate, or use your other supernatural powers to make sure these errors are not that serious that the only way to hope in recovering your data is use a really expensive specialized data recovery service. It's always better to prevent than to cure, and DiskWarrior can be configured to check drives periodically for possible malfunctions and warn you when a backup is required to ensure you won't lose your data, but you can also run the hardware monitoring manually if you feel there's something wrong with your hard drive(s).

No matter if you have problems or not, Alsoft's experience of over 20 years in making disk utilities for the Mac is a guarantee that - once you start using DiskWarrior - you'll have less worries and be able to concentrate more on your work. So, if you own a G3 Mac or better and Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, stay safe with DiskWarrior!