Alsoft Disk Warrior 3

File Vault caused me to be locked out of my main account (G4 Powerbook - Tiger)

Luckily, I had always had another account set on the same Mac Powerbook, something I would recommend to anyone. I purchased DiskWarrior and installed it there. I had also coped the file sparseimage and other user files to an external drive first as a precaution.

Initially I thought I was screwed and that Disk Warrior wasn't going to work because it was hanging and crashing when I was trying to use the 'graph ' function - So at that point I thought that I would proceed and hit the 'rebuild' button. ( I still give 5 stars for ease of use because the interface is so clean and simple)

Lo and behold it worked perfectly the first time and saved valuable business and personal documents. In short - it saved really saved me. Best 110 AUD I have spent recently.

The Alsoft Disk Warrior 3 Data Recovery and Back Up program has always been a miracle worker. I was getting errors on my parent's old G4 when I tried to upgrade to 10.4. Disc Warrior cleared out the problem! I installed the updated OS, and they're good to go. Another friend had a laptop with multiple problems, and really slow boot time. Disc Warrior (and to be fair, an update to the most recent OS) solved all of his problems - which were many. I love this program. When you need it, you REALLY need it.

I no sooner inserted Alsoft Disk Warrior in my iMac when I crashed. Had to remove the disk with a paper clip and unplug the computer before being able to restart. Alsoft would not give me my money back. They refuse to communicate further.

Alsoft Disk Warrior has actually been around a long time and spoken of in inner circles amongst Mac engineers but surprisingly it is nowhere near as popular as either Norton Utilities or Tech Tool Pro which is as much a shame as it is surprising. It really is an invaluable tool for SW problems and basically if DW can't recover it then no Mac utility will. It is much more specific than the others and deals with the directory files in far greater detail, this being the most common area of problems. It does also come with Plus Optimiser which is a good disk optimising tool but perhaps a little too hefty for most std. end-users who would be better off using Speed Disk in Norton U. Disk Warrior is not a replacement for anything in my book it compliments the other tools you may have. The beauty of Disk Warrior 3 is that not only is it OSX native but it is the only utility that will boot into the desktop environment which allows you the freedom to back any data up that you might have stranded on an archive (non-bootable) partition. This is very handy and really sets DW way above the rest. Strangely it is also the cheapest a snip around £60 odd. A must have for all Macs.