I am often asked what utilities I recommend for Mac support. Yes, Macs break too. I have a list here of the software I think all Mac support people should have or at least be aware of. I own and have used most of these utilities.

Disk Utilities and Data Recovery
Keeping you Mac running smoothly or fixing it when it is not sometimes can require the use of these software utilities. Recovering lost data is probably the most important thing for many users. Remember to back-up, as it is not “IF” your hard drive will fail, but “WHEN.”

ProSoft Drive Genius 2, $74.99 [from Amazon] - one of the best disk utilities for the Mac platform. Disk defrag, directory repair and repartition on-the-fly are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 2. Optimize your drive with Drive Genius. Yes, this is the same product used by Apple at the Genius Bar in their Apple ProCare program to defrag your drive.

ProSoft Data Rescue II, $84.99 [from Amazon] - data recovery software for recovering files from a problem hard drive or that have been previously deleted. This will sometimes work where others will fail.

Micromat TechTool Pro, $77.99 [from Amazon] - Apple ships TechTool Deluxe with AppleCare Protection Plans. This is its full featured big brother. TechTool Pro is more than a disk utility as it checks your Mac’s hardware for problems also. A complete solution.

Micromat DiskStudio, $43.99 [from Amazon] - allows you to create and remove disk partitions on the fly without reformatting your drive.

Micromat TechTool Protege, $229 [from Amazon] - tiny FireWire-based device that contains 2 gigabyte of memory and comes complete with the latest version of Mac OS X, the latest version of TechTool Pro and our latest drive utility DiskStudio that can bring back a dead Mac without a CD or DVD utility.

SubRosaSoft’s FileSalvage, $89.95 - powerful application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have been accidentally deleted or become unreadable due to media faults. Device and file system, which means that the user can recover files from a normal Mac OS hard drive, USB key, PC disk, Linux disk, FAT32 disk, FLASH card, scratched CD, Digital Cameras, iPods, and almost any other media or file system that can be recognized in Mac OS X. The file types that FileSalvage can recover is huge. Note: FileSalvage covers the most file types and does basically all the same things that SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage, PodSalvage, and CameraSalvage does.

SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage, $49.95 - Undelete your office documents from your Apple Macintosh computer. Recover files and rescue data from corrupted or damaged OS X hard drives. Retrieve data from formatted or initialized devices.

SubRosaSoft’s VolumeWorks, $59.95 - application for managing the partitions on your hard drive. VolumeWorks is designed to allow the end user the ability to rebuild a partition table, add partitions to a device, hide partitions, shift partitions, and resize partitions.

Alsoft Disk Warrior, $94.99 [from Amazon] - can build a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory from hard drives experiencing problems, thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover.

Totus Copy, $20 - is a utility designed to copy data off a failing, but still mountable, hard drive. It uses error-correcting transfer protocols with no time-out limit, scans directories as needed to minimize accesses, and copies files one-by-one rather than in batches. It can ignore invisible files, target files of a specific kind, target a specific directory, and recreate bundles and directories rather than trying to transfer them.

Backup Utilities
Sure I know there is Time Machine and Apple now has the nice Time Capsule product, but there is more to keeping your data safe with all our life’s stuff on these hard drives. The support call I get the most is lost data that is not backed up! So backup is essential to support for ALL computers. Lucky for Mac users there are some great tools, even some free ones.

ProSoft Data Backup 3, $42.99 [from Amazon] - backup, restore and synchronize your valuable data with minimal effort. Backup to any mounted drive including FireWire, USB, ATA, or networked drives. Backup to CD/DVD disks automatically span on multiple disks.

SubRosaSoft’s CopyCatX, $59.95 - Create exact duplicates of your hard drive, Apple iPod, or Mac OS X startup drive. CopyCatX is the fastest way to duplicate devices in most formats on your Mac.

SuperDuper!, free with $27.95 to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more! Great cloning and backup software for OS X.

Carbon Copy Cloner, donationware - clone, synchronize, backup and schedule. One of my all time favorites.

iPod Utilities
Many people carry music, videos, photos and in some cases their data on iPods. Here is a list of some iPod utilities in case disaster strikes. I have seen a computer hard drive failure with the ONLY back up of the users music and videos be on their iPod.

SubRosaSoft’s Podsalvage, $49.95 - Rescue lost songs from your Apple iPod using this data recovery software for Mac OS X. Undelete files, photos, and iTunes purchases. Recover data from corrupted MP3 players.

iPodRip, $14.95 - recovers your songs and playlists, playback of audio files and more from your iPod.

Senuti, donationware - simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer.

ipoddisk, free and open source - tool designed to make it easy and intuitive to copy music from your iPod.

PodWorks, $8 - PodWorks allows you to copy songs from any Mac iPod to any Mac running OS X.

Micromat PodLock, $39.99 [from Amazon] - makes storing data on an iPod more secure. Includes an iPod defragment tool to make an iPod run faster.

Mac Forensics Software
Beyond the usual utilities software for repairing your Mac or retrieving data, law enforcement people will most likely be most interested in these. The are costly, but they have capabilities that may be worth paying for.

SubRosaSoft’s MacForensicsLab, $1,195.00 - complete suite of forensics and analysis tools in one cohesive software package. Combining the power of many individual functions into one application in order to provide a single solution for law enforcement professionals and digital forensic investigators.

SubRosaSoft’s MacLockPick, $499.95 - valuable tool for law enforcement professionals to perform live forensics on Mac OS X systems. The solution is based on a USB Flash drive that can be inserted into a suspect’s Mac OS X computer that is running (or sleeping). Once the software is run it will extract data from the Apple Keychain and system settings in order to provide the examiner fast access to the suspect’s critical information with as little interaction or trace as possible.

File and Hard Drive Encryption and Protection
For the more paranoid or careful user.

SubRosaSoft’s FileDefense, $59.95 - adds a layer of security at the layer that we feel is the most important - the file access layer. When you have FileDefense installed, every single file an application opens is questioned and brought to your attention, thereby limiting the damage it can do if it is malicious.

TrueCrypt, Windows and OS X, free and open source - Create encrypted volumes that protect your important files providing two levels of plausible deniability.

HamachiX, free - frontend to hamachi, a secure mediated VPN client.

Other Noteworthy Utilities
Here is a fairly long list of helpful utilities worth pointing out.

SubRosaSoft’s CameraSalvage, $49.95 - Retrieve your photos from corrupt or formatted flash cards or other digital camera media. Undelete raw camera format files from OS X hard drives. Recover lost images from CDs and DVDs.

DasBoot, free - turn any flash drive or multi use storage device into a Mac OS X diagnostic, repair, and maintenance tool. DasBoot allows you to take any third party boot CD (such as those shipped by SubRosaSoft.com Inc, Prosoft Engineering Inc, Alsoft Inc, or Micromat Inc) and quickly create a bootable diagnostic device that contains any of your own utilities you may wish to install.

AppleJack, free - command-line utility that makes a number of troubleshooting procedures available via single-user mode at startup.

AppTrap, free - drag an unwanted application to the trash and a dialog window asks if you want to delete associated files.

AppZapper, $12.95 - delete an application and all the files that came with it in a drag drop zapp!

BackTrack, $15 - logs all text that is typed for all applications as a safety net.

BatChmod, donationware - Cocoa utility for manipulating file and folder privileges that can batch change and has useful Force Empty Trash command.

BetterZip, $19.95 - split files into certain sizes, open archives without having to expand them and extract only certain files plus encrypt your archives.

Bonjour for Windows, free for Windows 2000/2003, Windows XP or Windows Vista - enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks.

CleanApp, $10 - rid your system of a program and all the files that came with it in a snap!

Cocktail, $14.95 - general purpose utility with a mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface and toolset.

Gimp-Print, free - open-source printer drivers that provides access to a number of devices natively unsupported by Mac OS X.

Houdini, free - easily create, access, move and delete hidden files and folders.

iStat menus, free - monitors your entire system right from your menu bar.

LeopardAssist, free - allows you to install Leopard on some older, unsupported Macs.

Mac HelpMate, free - maintenance tool with the ability to run S.M.A.R.T hard drive tests, check temperature and hardware sensors, inspect installed packages, repairing permissions, cleaning caches, removing unnecessary trash files, and more.

Mac Shutdown X, $10 USD - shutdown a unattended Mac at the end of a download or on time basis.

MacJanitor, free - run system tasks at the click of a button, clean out hard drive stealing log files.

Mactracker, free, runs on OS X, OS 9, iPod, Windows - Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple computer, iPod, and product ever made.

Memtest, US$1.39 - ram-testing utility with the ability to find intermittent memory problems that are the frequent cause of unexplained crashes or freezes in Macs. Rember, free - front-end GUI to the ‘memtest’ command line memory testing program.

MenuMeters, donationware - set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools.

Monolingual, free - program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space.

NameChanger, free - application to rename a large list of files quickly and easily.

OpenPList, donationware - plist file editor.

Pacifist, $20 - invaluable extractor/custom installer for .pkg packages.

PatchBurn, donationware - Get your new unsupported optical burner to work with iTunes, iDVD, DiscBurner in OS X.

PDFKey Pro, $19.95 - easily recover from lost copying and printing PDF passwords. PDFKey Pro makes an unlocked copy of your PDF, without requiring you to enter a copying or printing password.

Safari Bookmarks Exporter, free - simple application that extract your bookmarks from Safari so you can import them to Firefox or another browser.

Winclone, free - clone your Boot Camp partition.

YemuZip, free - make Windows friendly .zip files.

Since I mentioned tools, I suggest for the brave ones that want to open their Mac a nice set of Torx drivers $24.95 [Amazon link] and small screwdrivers $28.21 [Amazon link] and seeing my repair links to the various take-a-parts.

Please note: Being your “own” mechanic can be hazardous to your Mac. I make NO guarantees - so, you are ENTIRELY at your OWN RISK! If you have little or no experience in upgrading or fixing computers or electronic gadgets, I recommend contacting a pro. These recommendations are informational only. We do NOT recommend taking apart your Mac or performing service on it in any way. Taking your Mac to an Apple Store or contacting a certified pro from the Apple Consultants Network may be the best decision you can make.

Email Post Email Post  Print Post Print Post | Tags: , , , , ,