Five great tools for troubleshooting your Mac
Recently Forrester Research released a report stating, in a nutshell, that it’s time to start supporting the Mac in the enterprise. If you haven’t had an opportunity to read the specifics head over to Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog and check out the brief version. If you’re interested in the full report it’s a bit pricy at $499 but you can purchase a copy directly from Forrester.
As more Macs make their way into organizations, large and small, here are some great support tools for maintaining and troubleshooting Macs.
Memtest OS X
Its usually pretty rare thing these days for a Mac to crash and lock up frequently, however, when and if it does happen memory is the first thing I think to test. Memtest OS X is great open source tool that runs from the command line for identifying issues within memory.
DiskWarrior 4
I’ve used DiskWarrior for years and have to come to rely on it as my primary data recovery tool. Instead of rebuilding damaged data on the faulty disk, DiskWarrior rebuilds the damaged drive based on the data, which can reduce imminent drive failure. It’s simple, powerful, and for m,e has been a reliable way to recover data.
Carbon Copy Cloner
These days I find myself relying primarily on Time Machine for backing up data. Time Machine, however, doesn’t always provide the flexiblility that is required for some tasks. This is where Carbon Copy Cloner comes in. Carbon Copy Cloner features the ability to back up to additional drives that Time Machine sometimes can’t access. It can be scheduled to back up at specific times, and is great for making a bootable backup of your existing drives.
TechTool Protogo
TechTool Protogo is a great utility that you can take with you. Much like the aforementioned utilities, TechTool Protogo is great for scanning hard drives, testing hardware, backing up, and much more — only without the need to install it directly to a potentially unresponsive Mac. Just install the suite of tools on a USB thumb drive and take it with you.
iStat Pro
iStat Pro is one of my favorite utilities. iStat is a simple widget that can be installed into Dashboard and is a powerful utility for accessing system information in a flash. It’s great for monitoring Wi-Fi signal strength, hardware temperatures, hard drive capacity and usage, and so much more. You can even install iStat Pro for iPhone and monitor your Macs remotely!
