A few months ago in TidBITS I compared the various disk repair programs then available for Mac OS X: Norton Utilities 8.0 ($100), DiskWarrior 3.0 ($80), Drive 10 1.1.4 ($70), Disk Guardian 2.2 ($70), and Apple's Disk Utility (free)

Some things are inevitable. Death, taxes, and disk crashes. One day you will try to open an important file, only to receive a dire error message. Or perhaps you'll discover that an entire folder has vanished

Optimizing disks is a waste of time. There, I said it. The horse is out of the bag, the cat is out of the barn. So why do so many people believe that an optimizer is an essential part of any Mac user's tool kit? And what does it mean to optimize a disk, anyway? Background Fragments -- When you save a file to disk, the file system looks for an empty space to write the data