![]() (If you use Time Machine, of course, it will have copies of files you’ve deleted.) Once that happens, the file isn’t recoverable-TechTool Pro can’t work miracles, and if the data’s not there, it’s not there. Older files were more troublesome-the longer a file has been deleted, the higher the odds that the space it used to occupy on the drive has been overwritten. In my tests, TechTool Pro did a very good job of recovering recently deleted and emptied files. You can try to recover any file in this list by selecting it and clicking a Restore button. A Show Trash History button in the Data Recovery tool lets you see everything you’ve put into or emptied from the Trash, including what day it was placed in the Trash and when the Trash was emptied. Trash History tries to keep track of the files you’ve deleted. To make the latter issue simpler to handle, TechTool Protection includes a Trash History feature that can be set for any number of days. The Data Recovery tool is just that-a tool designed to help you recover data files, whether they’re lost due to a damaged disk or an inadvertent emptying of the Trash. I wasn’t able to test how well TechTool Pro can rebuild catalogs on disks with less extensive corruption, however. Finally, I tried Apple’s own Disk Utility and its Repair Disk option, and it worked. I tried again with DiskWarrior, and it also failed. I subsequently wasn’t able to rebuild the catalog with TechTool Pro. To test this feature, I intentionally destroyed the catalog file on a FireWire drive by overwriting it with a copy of a catalog from another drive. This process is made simpler if you use TechTool Protection to back up the catalog files. Volume Rebuild attempts to make seemingly damaged disks usable again by rebuilding their catalog files, much asĭiskWarrior ( ) does. Volume Rebuild is another important tool that, with any luck, you won’t have to use very often. TechTool Pro 5 is also set to launch on boot, so you’ll be ready to troubleshoot as soon as the system reboots. ![]() When booted on the eDrive emergency partition, the desktop picture makes it perfectly clear that you’re not booted from your normal system. So while it’s not used often, eDrive is one of TechTool Pro’s more powerful features. This feature may be particularly useful to laptop users, as you don’t need to bring the TechTool Pro DVD with you when you travel. Creating the eDrive took about 45 minutes on my Mac Pro, and it then booted perfectly, displaying a custom desktop picture that left no doubt that I wasn’t booted from my normal drive. The eDrive is created directly within TechTool Pro 5, though to create an eDrive on your boot drive, you’ll need to reboot using the TechTool Pro DVD first so your boot disk isn’t active. You can’t, however, set different warning levels for different drives. You can easily exclude and include drives by using the check boxes. TechTool Pro will monitor your drives’ free space at intervals you define, watching for it to drop below a level you specify. ![]() During normal use of the machine, though, I never noticed this activity. ![]() On my Mac Pro, the background process was typically under 0.5 percent of CPU usage, with occasional spikes to 3 percent to 5 percent for a couple of seconds. In my testing, using the Protection panel had a minimal impact on resource utilization. You can set up alerts (on screen and via e-mail) to let you know when any of your drives or partitions drops below a defined percentage of free space, and you can set the time interval between such checks and specify which volumes will be checked. In addition to these as-needed tests, TechTool Pro includes the TechTool Protection System Preferences panel, which lets you automate some tests and reports. With a simple pass/fail for the entire drive, I wouldn’t have been aware of this potential problem. Either way, I know that I need to make sure my backups for that drive are up-to-date, as it may be on the verge of failure. One of my drives, for instance, passes its S.M.A.R.T tests but shows a nearly failing score for temperature changes-perhaps a sign of impending failure, or perhaps just an oddity with that drive. Instead of simply reporting pass or fail, as do many other tools, TechTool Pro displays a chart showing 18 separate tests, with an indicator for each test showing the results along the pass/fail scale. ![]() One test I was particularly impressed with was the S.M.A.R.T. You can also access each test individually from the Tests screen, to run it on an as-needed basis. You can cancel any individual test by clicking its X button. The Check Computer test runs a full series of tests. ![]()
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