Disk Watcher 1.1 review
DownloadDisk Watcher automates checking your disks for corruption.
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Disk Watcher automates checking your disks for corruption. With Disk Watcher you don't need to remember to regularly check your disks to prevent serious problems.
Disk Watcher will keep an eye on your disks and warn you when a disk has problems and needs to be fixed.
The disk checking itself is done by Disk First Aid - Disk Watcher takes care of the automation of it all. DiskWatcher will inform you if any disk problems are found and keeps a log of all it did. Optionally, Disk Watcher can even respond to disk errors by having custom "actions" launched. This makes Disk Watcher a very powerful tool.
The idea is 'damage prevention'. Too often people wait with running disk repair utilities until it is too late. Still fixable disk problems are ignored, new problems get stacked on top of the old ones, and finally the system breaks down and Disk First Aid can't fix it anymore. Then they have to run out and buy a disk repair utility (like DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro or Norton Disk Doctor) and can only hope that it can still fix things. In the mean time, the disk cannot be used safely.
These days, Apple's Disk First Aid is quite good at repairing problems as long as they aren't too severe. So the only thing you really need to do is run Disk First Aid on a regular basis, not waiting until you're having problems. Disk First Aid comes with the Mac OS, for free, so why not use it? Because it's too much work for most people - you need to remember to regularly launch Disk First Aid, select all the disks you want to check, and then tell Disk First Aid to check them.
With Disk Watcher you can afford to be lazy ;) You just install Disk Watcher and don't worry about disk corruption anymore. Disk Watcher will inform you when there is a problem.
What's New:
If the startup disk was busy and couldn't be checked, Disk First Aid was quit instead of left running. Fixed.
If DFA encountered a diskproblem it cannot fix, Disk Watcher would give up. Disk Watcher now correctly logs the error and continues.
When upgrading, the installer could accidentally revert your Disk Watcher settings to the default settings. Fixed.
If you trash the preferencess file ("DW Config" in the "Disk Watcher Preferences Folder") Disk Watcher will now install a fresh copy the next time it runs.
You can now define how often Disk Watcher will retry to check a busy disk.
Placing the text of error messages on the clipboard is now optional and is off by default. You should probably only switch it on if you are having problems with Disk Watcher and want to send the author the error message you are getting. Like all other options, this option can be switched on in Disk Watcher's configuration file ("DW Config", in the Disk Watcher Preferences folder). This option only works under Mac OS 8.5 and above.
Made some improvements to upgrade process.
Added a note about a conflict with "Control PPP" to the "known problems" chapter.
Requirements:
Disk First Aid (any language) version 8.2 or newer.
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