Diskwarrior 5.1 (Mac)

I made the mistake of running Time Machine backups on a network drive (not really a good idea), and the network drive was a Time Capsule (REALLY BAD IDEA!); so when a failed upgrade to MacOS Sierra bricked my Macbook Air, I found to my horror that the Time Machine backup was empty, even though the Time Capsule reported that it contained a large amount of data.A knowledgeable friend recommended DW as the best chance of recovering the important data. I gulped at the price; but having no option, I bought a copy. None too confident, I installed and ran the software on an iMac, and pointed it at the damaged Time Machine sparsebundle...Now, remember that DW is really designed for fixing damaged directories on directly connected (i.e internal or USB/firewire/etc external) drives that are formatted as MacOS Extended (Journalled), so my chances seemed slim for fixing a sparsebundle on an AFP-formatted network drive (which is what Time Capsules are). (Note to self: in future, only ever use USB drives, formated as MacOS Extended (Journalled) for Time Machine backups!)I waited with mounting anxiety for DW to 'rebuild' the damaged sparsebundle. It seemed to take forever - but then the Time Capsule is a massive 2Tb, and it was almost full of Time Machine data...At last, after what felt like an eternity (but was probably only about 10 minutes), DiskWarrior reported it had successfully rebuilt the directories and recovered all the files! At this point, DW does not write anything back on to the drive: rather, it shows you a 'Preview' of the directories and files it will restore. This allows you to see whether some of the data is still damaged, and decide that you need to try some other method of getting it back before DW makes that difficult or impossible by writing the faulty versions back on to your drive. But the completely genius bit is that DW lets you copy recovered directories and files from the Preview! Indeed, it recommends that you do this for important data.So I copied off all the stuff I needed, and tested it to see that it was OK. And this turned out to be a good idea, because when I told DW to rebuild the sparsebundle, and it started to do so, it threw an error to say it was unable to rebuild the 'drive' and that I should run the program again to have another go. I did, but got the same error again. And then I realised that the reason DW couldn't rebuild the drive was that the Time Machine sparsebundle was on a networked AFP-formatted Time Capsule drive, and that's NOT what DW is designed to fix. (I contacted the fast, helpful and friendly DW support team by email, and they confirmed that this is was, indeed, the problem.)In other words, DW has retrieved all my data, even though I was asking it to rebuild a type of drive it wasn't really designed for. How's that for awesome?So if, like me, you gulp when you see the price of this package, buy it anyway: it is very probably the best tool you'll ever own for rebuilding damaged directories on a Mac. (And I haven't even mentioned that it comes on a bootable USB drive, that you can plug in and use to rebuild a damaged main hard disk on a Mac that won't even boot, using the Mac's 'recovery boot mode'.)Just buy it!

Software didn't do the job at all. Getting tons of error codes but no actual results. Fair enough, contacted their support and no response after 3 days at all. The software is still basic and there are free opensource solutions available that offer more in dept changes. With Disk Warrior you press a button and it either fixes it or throws errors at you like disk manager.

I like it. It works for hard drive repair.

Although this version of Disk Warrior doesn’t work fully with the latest versions of Mac OS they are working on this and it works brilliantly with earlier iterations I’ve used it in the past to start up seemingly unresponsive iMacs and just used it to repair the directory on an external 4TB drive that wouldn’t mount after a power cut. It took about 10 minutes.Expensive but worth every penny!

Within a week the problems with my Macbook had gone from annoying to critical. It started with the beach ball turning round and round a few times a day until finally it was impossible to get beyond logging on. The disk utility failed to exterminate the problem and it looked as if my two year old Mac was dead. At this point it's important to remember that one should back up the hard disk regularly.Disk warrior took only five minutes to resolve the problem.

I expected this to do a lot more than it does for the money.

It gets as far as allowing me to choose the green drive icon then goes away on holiday. Refund time.

Costs a fortune, but worth every penny. I had a dodgy external SSD which neither Disk Utility nor Paragon Hard Disk Manager could do anything for. Not life & death, but a blooming nuisance to lose a bunch of files. Tried the only genuinely free solution I could find, and it didn't work either. Shelled out for this, received it the same day, installed it - it found my disk automatically, restored the files and rebuilt the file system - no need to wipe, set up partitions and start again. Shows you get what you pay for, IMHO - a very happy customer.