Diskwarrior 6 Release Date

[Barbro Faries]

There is a lot of misinformation and confusion on this topic. Currently, no utility can rebuild the directory of APFS disks on Mac. That includes DiskWarrior (the best in the repair arsenal), TechTool Pro (second choice) and Drive Genius (third choice). Worst of all, macOS versions above 10.12 Sierra re-format disks as APFS, so users are left in the cold. Apple should not do that!!!

**Note: Optimization for APFS rotational drives is not yet possible with the current amount of APFS documentation provided by Apple, which currently provides insufficieant documentation for defragmenting a disk.

APFS formatting. No utility can fully support APFS at the moment, both because APFS is itself a work-in-progress, and Apple has yet to release documentation for it for developers. What is needed is documentation at least as detailed as the one for the HFS+ filesystem.

Using DiskWarrior 5.2 while started (booted) from High Sierra or Mojave. What's in the works. The next major release of DiskWarrior will include the ability to rebuild APFS disks. Apple has recently released the APFS format documentation. Our developers are now using that documentation to update DiskWarrior to be able to safely rebuild APFS disks.

That is FALSE. They CANNOT release a new version of DiskWarrior to rebuild directory of APFS until Apple releases the full documentation. Clearly, they do not want to reveal the plain truth, since their living depends on that! Alsoft should not do it!!! Customers deserve the truth!

SO, THE CONCLUSION IS THAT SOME DEVELOPERS ARE NOT TELLING THE PLAIN TRUTH, BUT AT LEAST ONE IS. IT IS IMPORTANT TO SEND FEEDBACK TO APPLE SO THAT THEY RELEASE DOCUMENTATION ABOUT HOW TO WRITE TO APFS DISKS AS THEY HAVE DONE ABOUT HOW TO READ THEM. THEN AND ONLY THEN THE REPAIR UTILITIES WILL BE RELEASED TO REBUILD THE DIRECTORY OF APFS DISKS:

Disk Warrior is much better and efficient repairing damaged disks than Disk Utility, because only the former rebuilds from scratch the directory of HFS+ disks. I am still waiting for DiskWarrior 6 to do it with APFS disks.

In relation to Stellar Data Recovery Professional, it does not repair disks; it recovers files from them. Thus, they are completely different applications. It is good to have both and use them depending on the issue to address (repair disks or recover files). The best is to repair disks, but if that is not possible, the second can help to recover files to other disk (the damaged disk will continue being damaged with such second approach).

Thank you for the detailed response. I appreciate the info and your expertise. Hopefully, the day will come (soon) that Apple releases complete documentation of the APFS file system so developers and the rest of us can get on with our lives. : )

Once you get the drive fixed make a backup and then either run the defragment tool or reformat the drive and install a fresh OS onto it then recover your data from the backup (TimeMachine) being the better one.

I've tested the drive itself in DRIVEDX and it has 100% health. it's a 1 month old seagate firecuda 1 TB SSHD. It's running the most up to date version of Mojave. I think her data is corrupt, because i've moved the drive to multiple MacBooks and get the same error.

Use TimeMachine to create a backup and then restore to a fresh drive to double check to see if the corruption is resolved. I'f possible format the test drive HFS+ so you can then use the better tools. Once you feel confident the spare drive is good, reformat the Seagate and re-install macOS as needed. I would strongly recommend you use Migration Assistant.

Not surprised at the criminal monopoly, conspiracy theorist have also gone as far as alleging Jobs was assassinated by the government who has been in the backseat of Apple since the hiring of ex Cyber Security from NSA which kind of does match the whistle blowers info out there about the domestic spying abuses against citizens including the current president for personal gain or investment interests carried out by agencies with zero over sight from DOJ or the office of the inspectors General,

But regardless if any of this is true or really spread miss information to smear america its just shows the lack of trust people have with Apple and all these sketchy data recovery apps that require you to be online to use them.

I use a few of these apps and I don't need be online to use them. This gets into if you are buying a standalone app or a cloud based app. As an example MS Office can be bought as either as installed app on your drive (no network access at all) or as a service via cloud.

Of course companies will go the direction most profitable, but im just saying that T$m Cr00k will and has openly ventured into illegal areas that have not yet been addressed by our US or international courts ,

He is a pro at it, for example, while with Jobs he was the one flying to China visiting child slave factories and arranging shipments of 3,4 quarter batches of devices to contain toxic cheap parts assembled by child slave factories., more cuts more profits and its true, Apple has been fined over and over and they dont mind paying the fines as Mr$ Crook has learned that paying the fines is also more profitable then recalls, paying class action law suites off etc cause Apple makes $350 million an hour from all this itself,

BTW did you know that Catalina has a backdoor as wide as Opra's fat tush just begging for a justification to get your device bricked remotely, some times for as little reasons as some random p0rn advert appearing on a webpage while your browsing netflix.

This is not a political blog and we really don't like slamming people no matter who they are. So please let's not travel down this path. I understand your anger and frustration. Thats why we are fighting hard for the Right to Repair

Please help push it! What you are seeing is the seeds of our efforts sprouting! The movement is alive and well but it needs bodies behind it screaming at the local and regional politicians to alter the laws of the land.

BTW i thought the RIGHT TO REPAIR movement already succeeded with new laws that will require manufactures to create innovative products that are mod like repairable (hard drives, cameras, memory upgrades etc) no?

No Right to Repair here in the US is still not locked in and even the EU its not. All you've seen is the dialog and proposed laws, nothing has been made the law of the land. Thats why its important to keep the pressure on!

If the drive passes the Disk Utility testing, there is probably a software issue and you can reinstall the OS from the restore partition or an internet boot. HOWEVER, if this occurred IMMEDIATELY following an attempt to install Catalina chances are the install and accompanying restructuring of the drive went sideways and you will probably never get it to run correctly again without reinitializing the drive (APFS) and doing a clean reinstall of the OS.

No. DW is still out of business because Apple has not released those specs. It seems they are putting all of their eggs in the Disk First Aid program. I have heard that the new APSF format does not create a catalog that has to be rebuilt. That is what DW did so didn't need it. I have not been able to verify that with any technical expert.

One of my favorite Mac apps, DiskWarrior, has been waiting for the APFS format documentation (also called the APFS volume specification) for a while, in order to make a new program version which can rebuild APFS disks. Recently, according their page linked above, this documentation was released and Alsoft is using it to update DiskWarrior. I would like to look at this documentation myself, as I find it interesting. However, I can't find the documentation anywhere. I've found a few documents like this, but I don't think that's what I'm looking for, since that document is not as comprehensive as what I would expect from a full volume format specification.

Prior to the Apple File System Reference, there was no consolidated documentation from Apple regarding APFS - at least not to this level of detail. In fact, the most comprehensive documentation until this was released was actually the result of private academic work in the computer forensics field.

Apple has not yet published full APFS documentation. Only information about reading APFS disks has been released. Missing documentation is about how to write to APFS disks. Until then, DiskWarrior 6 to rebuild APFS disk directory cannot be released.

Providing full support for APFS is entirely dependent on Apple releasing the required documentation for developers. So far, only the documentation explaining the APIs for reading APFS volumes has been released. It is about 140 pages long. We need similar documentation for writing to APFS volumes.

Why? When will it happen? Surprisingly, APFS is still a work in progress. We could say that it is still in beta phase. Hopefully, Apple will announce Time Machine 2 supporting APFS on June 2020 (WWDC). Then, macOS 10.16 with it will be released by end of September 2020. And then Apple will hopefully release really and truly full (sort of) APFS documentation. Then DiskWarrior 6 could be expected in about three to six months testing period. Hopefully.

My MacBook needs a good clean up and I used DiskWarrior in the past but it won't work on AFPS anymore. There are a few things that don't work fine, for example, I can't download my Apple books anymore.

I used DiskWarrior for checking and correcting or rebuilding the file directory. This would solve over 90% of my problems. This is what I want to do again but can't because it can't rebuild an AFPS directory. That's why I'm looking for an alternative,

APFS is proprietary to Apple and arrived with High Sierra in 2017. Since then there are a few vendors who have added support for APFS. But the built-in Disk Utility should be enough especially with modern SSD drives. Typically you would run the First Aid at the lowest level first and work your way up to the Container and then the Physical Disk.

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