Disk Warrior vrs Rstudio

[pcpete]

We have a person bring in a 4tb drive with hfs+. I think the history was it just quit mounting. We made an image to your 5tb drive, no unread sectors, perfect. Then we plugged it into our computer to see if rstudio would see its file system quickly, it did not. Since the time to scan such a large drive would take a whole day, I decided to see if Disk Warrior would fix it. One minute total it recovered the file system and we were able to copy the data off, Do you think if we would have done a long scan rstudio would have been successful? This is the second drive we have have tremendous success with Disk Warrior. Of you dedicated DR professionals(or others), do you think Disk Warrior is superior to rstudio for many applications of data recovery? I do understand they have two main ways of working, one just recovers files and one makes a system mountable.

 

[lcoughey]

I probably would have recovered with R-Studio in a few seconds. DiskWarrior is pretty good for hfs+ file system repair, but if the changes are written, the lost file structure is permanently lost. R-Studio does not alter the destination, so you can dig deeper as needed. DataRescue is another good hfts recovery program.

 

[Markverhyden]

A little history. DW's original purpose was to rebuild the file system for an Apple computer. Back in the pre-OS X days corruption would cause many problems and running that would actually have a real impact on system performance. Including resurrecting unbootable drives. Starting OS X Apple switched to a BSD derivative which also included some features from NeXTSTEP, also a *nix derivative. *nix's are very well known for having stable file systems but even they get corruption issues so things like fsck and it's other file system type versions help. Not sure exactly what DW uses as they claim it's proprietary. But I will say I've not seen DW improve OS X performance for many years.

I've used it to repair HFS+ file systems that would not mount to the regular OS. R-Studio will recover the files but for some reason is not able to parse the original file system layout which obviously is problematic. Unlike M$ file systems where you see multiple partition options and can test those. So if a HFS+ drive can image without too many issues I'll first use DW to try to recover the original file system structure. To date, not a statistically significant sample of maybe 20 times, it's always been able to do the job. The only shortcoming I've seen is with volumes that have Time Machine backups. That has it's own limits.

 

[pcpete]

I probably would have recovered with R-Studio in a few seconds. DiskWarrior is pretty good for hfs+ file system repair, but if the changes are written, the lost file structure is permanently lost. R-Studio does not alter the destination, so you can dig deeper as needed. DataRescue is another good hfts recovery program.

Thanks I appreciate your opinion You said quickly recover with R-Studio, if when clicking on the partition it says no file system found, then tells you to do a deep scan, would our only option been to let it scan the whole disk and see what it found?

 

[fencepost]

I've never used it, but I suspect that R-Studio would identify the filesystem almost immediately after starting to scan and would be able to work intelligently from there.

 

[labtech]

I've never used it, but I suspect that R-Studio would identify the filesystem almost immediately after starting to scan and would be able to work intelligently from there.

High chance this is exactly what it would have happened. Stopping and resuming scanning is a nice feature R-Studio has.

 

[pcpete]

I guess I should have said file directory not system/type