Make your computer faster, safer, easier to run - using disk utility software

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1991 by Steve Morgenstern

Make Your Computer Faster, Safer, Easier to Run

Lose a file, lose an hour. Or a day. Or a client.

And unfortunately, it isn't difficult to lose a file. Your hard-disk drive has a platter spinning at thousands of rotations per minute, with a magnetic head floating on a thin cushion of air above it. The power in your home blinks for an instant - the head comes crashing down on the rotating platter. Is your file still there?

Most problem-causing events are far less dramatic. A program fouls up when writing to disk, mistakenly grabbing some space dedicated to another file. You accidentally leave a floppy disk lying on top of your stereo speaker or telephone (there are magnets in there, remember?). Gremlins creep into your office in the middle of the night and intentionally foul up your hard drive (can you prove to me it doesn't happen?).

Whatever the cause, there is a solution to the lost file woes - an assortment of powerful utility programs that help repair disk damage. This month we review six leading utility packages, three for IBM compatibles, three for the Macintosh. While none is a cure-all, each program offers effective solutions to a host of common disk-related problems. And each goes beyond disk repair with additional utilities to improve performance and add convenience to your computer system. In truth, any one of these packages is the basic utility software that most people need for their systems.

Better still, you no longer have to be a rocket scientist to use a disk-utility program. While most of these packages include capabilities best suited for experts, the utilities needed to recover from most file problems can be mastered in about a half hour by anyone who knows how to run a computer.

Before we discuss specific program features, though, there are two fundamental points to bear in mind:

1. Make backup copies of your valuable files. Even the most powerful file-recovery program is no substitute for a backup copy of the information, on a separate disk, stored in a safe place. In fact, for your most vital files, making two or even three backups is not an excessive precaution. And as you'll see, some of the programs discussed here make it easy to do disk backups.

2. The best time to install disk-utility software is before you experience problems. By letting the utility analyze your drive and store crucial information when everything is running fine, you greatly increase the chances that you'll be able to rescue your files if you run into trouble later.

With those caveats delivered, let's look at the benefits offered by these "Swiss Army knife" software packages in four areas: file recovery, performance enhancement, file security, and convenience.

FILE RECOVERY

There are two basic ways to lose disk files: The computer can do it by accident or you can do it yourself. In either case, a good disk utility should help restore your files and your sanity.

The disk ate my work! On the computer side, there are all sorts of potential problems that can cause a file to disappear or be impossible to open. You may even lose access to an entire disk - you turn on the computer and the hard disk refuses to boot, or you insert a floppy and the operating system tells you it is unreadable. While these problems can result from physical damage to a disk, they occur more often when the information magnetically encoded on the disk surface is corrupted.

Operating systems reserve part of your disk for record-keeping purposes, including a listing of where on the disk your files are located. When this area is damaged, the operating system can't find your files, even though they're still on the disk. File-recovery utilities handle this situation by

* creating a backup copy of this record-keeping information, which they can use to restore your disk to working order if the original is disturbed; and

* scanning your disk for files, recovering all or selected files, and often rebuilding the directory and subdirectory (DOS) or Desktop folder (Mac) structure of the disk.

Sometimes an individual file gets damaged. In this case, a disk utility will try to reclaim as much of it as possible. For example, even a small flaw may cause the operating system to consider your 50-page text file entirely unreadable. By using a file-recovery utility you can reclaim the file and retype only the section that was actually damaged.

Oops! Of course, while we would like to blame every mistake on the computer, the far more embarrassing human error is all too frequently the cause of our file-loss distress. |There are three ways you can get rid of files on purpose. You can simply delete a file, you can write data over existing data, or you can format an entire drive. In these cases, you may still be able to get those files back.

First the good news. When you ask the operating system to delete a file, it doesn't delete the information contained in that file. It simply removes the file name from your directory and makes the space occupied by the file available for the next time you save information to disk. This means that, until that space is used again, the information in your deleted file is still there. It's a simple matter for a utility to find and recover a recently deleted file. And even if the operating system has used some of the space to save a different file, you may be able to recover a worthwhile portion of the original.