Aug 27, 2014 You have a Mac, or maybe you're responsible for taking care of them at your business. You need an toolkit of apps that help you get out of trouble when your Mac's not working right. Maybe a hard drive needs rebuilding or recovery, the memory needs testing, you're desperate to un-delete files, you need to access to deeper system maintenance, or you simply want to better clean out the. The Maintenance Software tools help users to upgrade or tune up their equipment. All sorts of repairs can be made easy using these highly efficient maintenance tools. Choose and install the most compatible tool to perform all sorts of maintenance tasks on various equipment and keep them in good working condition. 60Hertz Maintenance Management Software is designed to meet the real challenges of maintaining rural assets. We understand the pains of poor connectivity, manual processes, and managing different ability levels. These translate to missed oil changes, performance degradation, and even catastrophic failures. Besides everything you’d expect from a top-rated car maintenance app, Simply Auto offers built-in GPS-tracking to easily record all tax-deductible and reimbursable mileage. Available for free, it’s also the only app that allows users to track fuel economy based on octane, brand and filling station.
At times, data stored in Mac’s internal or external hard drive gets corrupted or faces logical damage. To get rid of such issues, you need to take help from professional Mac disk repair software. In this blog, we have made an earnest attempt to list the top disk repair software for Mac users.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Free Mac Hard Drive Repair Software
- Disk Utility
- FSCK
- Onyx
- Paid Mac Hard Drive Repair Software
- Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac
- DiskWarrior
- Drive Genius
- TechTool Protogo
- Conclusion
Introduction
A hard drive tends to fail due to usage, aging, and physical or logical damage. In case of logical damage to the hard drive, a Mac hard drive recovery software can help you retrieve your inaccessible data. But if the damage is physical, such as the presence of bad sectors or blocks, you need to use some advanced disk management methods to fix the issue from the storage drive. The following section describes free Mac hard drive repair software that can help you resolve hard-drive issues.
Free Mac Hard Drive Repair Software
A. Disk Utility
You might have used the Disk Utility functionality of Mac to diagnose and resolve problems encountered in your Mac hard drive. Disk Utility is a built-in macOS diagnostic tool to eliminate fundamental issues such as directory structure damage, file system permission problem, and so forth.
To repair Mac hard drive through Disk Utility, navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Or else, press Command + Space Bar to open Spotlight, type disk utility, and select it to launch the application. From the Disk Utility window, choose the hard drive (other than the startup drive), then click First Aid. Click Run to initiate the drive fixing. But if you require to fix the startup disk, restart your Mac and immediately press and hold Command + R keys. Release when the Apple logo appears. In the macOS Utilities window, select Disk Utility, then click Continue. Select the Startup disk from the sidebar, then click First Aid. Click Run to begin the startup drive repair process.
B. FSCK
Besides Disk Utility, Single User mode can also help you perform Mac hard disk repair on your iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook. macOS Mojave or later operating systems don’t have this mode enabled. Even when your Mac has a firmware password, this mode won’t load. For the rest, to open this boot mode, start your Mac, then immediately press and hold Command + S hotkey, release when some white character appears on a black screen. Single User Mode shows a UNIX-style command-line interface that can help fix startup disk issues. In the command prompt, type /sbin/fsck – fy, then press Return to run the file-system-consistency-check command. If the startup disk is healthy, the message “The Volume (name) appears to be OK” is displayed. Restart Mac usually; if a message “File System Was Modified” appears, rerun the fsck command till the OK message is displayed. Restart Mac normally.
Disk Utility and FSCK command lack comprehensive storage drive management features, repair functionality, and other advanced diagnostic & tech tools that are essential for you to run Mac smoothly. So, use a free third-party tool to augment advanced utilities catering to repair, diagnosis, and drive management. The following section shares such a free Mac hard drive repair software.
C. OnyX
OnyX is a personalization, optimization, and maintenance utility for Mac OS X. The software has advanced features to execute system maintenance, run storage drive diagnostics, configure system hidden features, and delete caches. Its repair utility helps you to repair hard disk drives for errors and inaccessibility. The software is excellent for keeping your Mac so that it functions without any glitch.
Paid Mac Hard Drive Repair Software
A. Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac
It is one of Mac’s best hard drive recovery software that recovers corrupt Mac hard disk data. Also, the software recovers lost APFS partitions, external hard disks, SSDs, Time Machine, password-enabled drive, and Fusion drives. The latest version of the software creates a recovery drive and performs file recovery from non-booting Mac systems.
Leverage this Mac Professional data recovery tool if the storage disk drive has logical corruption and the external drive is unmounted or not showing up on Mac. Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac scans the Mac storage disk drive to recover permanently deleted files as well.
You can connect an external hard drive and perform formatted recovery, partition recovery and restore lost data conveniently. The software has a built-in Drive Monitoring utility that monitors your start-up drive’s health and S.M.A.R.T. status. With the Professional version, you can run a Quick Scan to find out the bad blocks on Mac’s storage disk. The following section shares how to repair Mac hard drive and how data recovery works.
How does it work?
The working process of the software is relatively easy and intuitive. Free download the tool now:
Select: All you need to do is select the type of file you wish to recover, click Next, then select the storage drive from where you want to retrieve files.
Scan: Specify a type of scan — Quick or Deep Scan — then click the Scan button to initiate the scanning process. The software shows a dynamic scan-preview.
Recover: Once the hard drive scanning is over, preview and select all the required files, then click Recover. Click Browse, specify a distinct drive location, then click Save.
Wait till the recovery is over. That’s it. You’ve successfully recovered data from your Mac hard drive in 3-quick steps.
B. DiskWarrior
DiskWarrior is a useful disk repair utility for Mac with quite a different repairing functionality, unlike other disk repair tools. The software creates replacement data based on the original data instead of rebuilding damaged data. Subsequently, the software ensures there is no inaccuracy in creating the new data structure from the original one. The software can also be used as a preventive maintenance utility for Mac storage devices. When you execute the software, it rebuilds and optimizes the directory, thereby removing any data structure damage and improving drive performance.
C. Drive Genius
Drive Genius is a beneficial disk utility tool for your Macintosh computer. The tool can be used to repair a hard disk drive even if your Mac does not boot; a supplementary bootable DVD comes in handy to boot your computer from it and launch the tool. Some of the essential features of the tool include directory repair, repartitioning, cloning, surface scanning, defragmenting, executing bench tests, performing integrity checks, and above all, shredding data (which is generally not a consolidated feature of a repair utility).
D. TechTool Protogo
It is quite an excellent holistic Mac utility that is laden with advanced features. The volume rebuild tool examines, rebuilds, and repairs corrupted directories of hard drives. The utility can help you create a bootable Mac repair toolbox on your flash drive or external hard disk drive, which can be used when your Mac does not boot. The software can be used to run diagnostics, repair and recover data, optimize the hard disk drive’s performance, defragment the drive, and delete data securely.
Conclusion
Now you know that the built-in Disk Utility tool of your Mac and FSCK command in single-user mode isn’t sufficient to meet your advanced troubleshooting needs. Functionality beyond these free native repair tools is a must to get your Mac up and running.
The top five Mac disk repair software presented in this blog can be used to perform hard disk bad block repair and fix hard disk drive for errors, inaccessibility, or system corruption. These five software are either free or can be availed as a trial. So, download the trial version of any repair software to recover your hard disk drive.
And above all, do not forget to give Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac a considerate try, as its latest release excels in disk repair capability, appealing GUI, advanced features, and excellent technical support. Also, the software has a price advantage over other disk repair utilities. The tool is 100% safe & secure and has a 30-day money-back guarantee, in case you are not satisfied.
A new Mac always seems to be lightning quick. But then it might slow down up to 17% when its disk is near full (confirmed by MacWorld in a test). And there we got a whole world of Mac optimization apps. Some of them are good enough that even Apple employees use them (Guy Kawasaki, for one). So here are some absolutely essential Mac optimizers to check in 2021.
These are top 3 optimizers that look most optimistic to us (sorry for the pun). We've chosen these among hundreds of others mentioned on Mac Forums.
Rating | Name | Features | Info |
---|---|---|---|
1 | CleanMyMac X | Includes tools for optimizing your Mac, securely deleting files, and scanning for malware. | Link |
2 | AVG | Quick scan and deep cleaning of all kinds of junk | Link |
3 | Onyx | Allows you to adjust parameters that would normally need to be set in Terminal | Link |
All three are aimed at basic Mac housekeeping. And now, let's dive into these options and then we'll analyze a few more relevant alternatives.
Best Mac Optimizer software reviewed
Made by independent macOS developer, MacPaw, this app tops our chart.
1. CleanMyMac X
This app, which is notarized by Apple, is absolutely gorgeous visually. But it also sports 49 tools to optimize a Mac in one app. It has a free version you can download and play around with.
Inside, you’ll find a full range of tools that will declutter your Mac, make it run faster, and even scan it for malware and remove whatever it finds. One of the great things about CleanMyMac X is that you choose how much control you take over what it removes.
In terms of Mac optimization, you can:
- Free up RAM memory
- Disable heavy memory consumers
- Run Maintenance scripts
It’s worth checking, anyway if you want to improve your Mac’s performance.
2. AVG Cleaner
AVG Cleaner has two functions — to find and remove “junk”’ files one you Mac and to identify duplicate files and make it easy to remove them. The files AVG Cleaner tracks down include cache files from web browsers, apps, photos, and videos; log files; download history; broken downloads; and Trash contents.
When you launch the app, you’ll see it has a clean, modern interface that gives you the option of scanning your Mac for files to clean, or scanning for duplicates. Once you’ve chosen the Disc Cleaner and the scan is complete, you can press a button to clean up the files it has found or view them in more detail and decide which to delete and which to keep. If you choose to scan for duplicates, AVG Cleaner will ask you which folders you want to scan and then show you what it found.
AVG Cleaner is free, l looks great, and works well. However, compared with CleanMyMac X, it lacks many features. These include a malware removal tool, secure file deletion, optimization tools and an app uninstaller.
3. OnyX
Like most of the apps listed here, OnyX is more than just optimization software for your Mac. It also has a number of tools for cleaning your Mac. However, OnyX also does something that no other tool listed here does: it allows you to adjust settings on your Mac that are otherwise only available through the Terminal app. It’s more of a customizer for your macOS.
Whether you want to rebuild a database or index, or just changed the default location or file format for screenshots, you can do it in OnyX. In terms of optimization tools, OnyX can clean up system files and browser data, rebuild Spotlight and Launch Services databases, run maintenance scripts and clean up recent items lists.
It doesn’t have a secure file deletion tool or malware scanner, however. And it’s nowhere near as user friendly as tools we’ve described above. If you like playing around with settings and getting under the hood of your Mac, though, it’s a good choice.
4. Drive Genius
Drive Genius started out many years ago as a tool for monitoring the performance of your drive, warning you of any potential problems and allowing you to fix them. It has evolved into a tool for optimizing performance and cleaning up drives, as well as keeping it safe.
Some of its features, such as re-partition, rebuild, and de-fragment, don’t work on APFS drives, but the others do. Those other tools include a malware scanner and removal tool, a secure erase utility, and tools for finding and removing duplicate and large files. In addition to those, Drive Genius still has tools for identifying potential problems that could lead to drive failure and allows you to fix them.
It’s not as user-friendly as similar apps, and doesn’t include an application uninstaller and tools for removing login items and launch agents.
5. macOS Manage Storage
Manage Storage is a feature that’s built into recent versions of macOS. To access it, click on the Apple menu, then About this Mac> Storage> Manage Storage.
When you do that you’ll see a list of categories on the left-hand side of the window that opens. At the top is Recommendations. This is where macOS helps you easily free up storage space by recommending what to get rid of. For example, it might recommend that you store files in iCloud and only keep recent ones on your Mac, or that you allow the OS to delete Apple TV downloads you’ve already watched.
The other categories cover things like Mail attachments, Garageband sound libraries, podcasts, and iOS backups. You just click on each section in turn and follow the advice in the window.
Manage Storage is a very useful tool and can certainly help free up storage space. However, it is not a replacement for a tool like CleanMyMac X because there is no app uninstaller and there are no tools to remove junk files or optimize performance.
6. CCleaner
CCleaner is one of the oldest cleaner tools around, having been available on the Mac for nearly a decade and on Windows before that. It offers tools to get rid of junk files cluttering up your Mac, remove cookies, history files, and other web browser data, and disable login items and launch agents. It also has an app uninstaller, and the professional version offers real-time protection against potentially harmful files you may download.
Like most tools here, you can choose to follow its recommendations and remove files with just a few clicks, or review the files it finds and choose which to remove yourself.
CCleaner has many of the tools available in CleanMyMac X. However, it’s not as easy to use, in our opinion, thanks to its less friendly user interface. It also doesn’t have a tool to allow you to quickly see what files are occupying space on your Mac, like CleanMyMac X’s Space Lens, or a way of securely shredding sensitive files.
7. Disk Clean Pro
Disk Clean Pro offers many of the same tools as the other cleaners here. You can use its automated utilities to quickly get rid of junk files, logs, crash reports and partial downloads. And you can also use it to identify and remove duplicate files, old files, large files and old downloads. There are also tools to remove browser files, aloud backups and mail downloads.
Like CCleaner, however, its interface isn’t the friendliest. Also, there are no tools for scanning for malware, securely deleting files, or uninstalling apps.
Does Mac optimization involve cleaning?
Many of the tools above belong to the category of cleaners, so why place them here? To answer that, we should define “optimization” more clearly. If optimization means improving the performance, it does entail a bit of cleaning that is improving something by elimination. To optimize any computer, one should start with removing blockages, massive unwanted objects, and apps that eat up a lot of memory.
There are lots of applications that can optimize your Mac’s performance and make it run more smoothly. Most of these apps are paid, but you can get away with a free version in some cases.
Best Free Maintenance Software For Mac Operating System
We would rather pick CleanMyMac X for the sheer number of features and its looks but the choice is yours.