Mac Repair Made Easy

Macs aren’t known for being easy to repair - but many of the problems that can plague them are relatively straightforward to fix. The key is having the right tools for the job.
Apple has recently announced a new tool to help customers who have opened their Macs for repairs and upgrades. This is a good step for the Right to Repair movement, but it doesn’t eliminate all of the hurdles that remain.
1. Disk Utility
Disk Utility is a powerful built-in application that macOS provides you with to manage and maintain the disks in your computer. It has a wide variety of options that make it easy for you to create, format, partition, repair, or erase disks on your Mac. Moreover, it is a great tool for troubleshooting any disk problems you may encounter.
Disk utility is available in the Utilities folder in Finder or from the Launchpad. Alternatively, you can also open it by booting the computer in Recovery Mode. For Apple silicon Macs, turn on the machine and hold the power button; for Intel-based Macs, press and hold the Command and R keys until you see the Recovery Mode menu. Select Disk Utility, then choose Continue.
Once the disk utility opens, you can see all the disks and storage devices connected to your Mac in the sidebar on the left. Mac Repair he disks are displayed in the order of their identifiers, while the containers and volumes are nested within each disk.
If you encounter an error on your startup disk, you can run the First Aid option in Disk Utility. It will perform a series of checks on your disk to see if it can fix the problem. If the issue is beyond repair, you will need to back up your data and contact Apple support for guidance.
2. OnyX
For more than a decade, OnyX has been the utility tool of choice for Mac techies, the final program they run on a client's computer to clean things up before calling it quits. It's excellent at digging into deeply-rooted chunks of the operating system, repairing permissions and rebuilding databases, reorganizing file structures and hard disk indexes, and rooting through odd settings that can cause bizarre behavior.
Unlike most utilities, OnyX doesn't aspire to be a jack-of-all-trades. It has a bare-bones look that can require some expertise to navigate, but it is focused on functionality and does what it does well. That said, some of the tasks can be intensive -- especially when verifying a startup disk structure, which can take a while and requires a few hours of computer downtime.
In addition to performing basic maintenance functions, OnyX also allows users to change the Startup Disk and System file structure, configure some hidden parameters in Finder, Dock, and Apple applications, remove cache files and folders, and more. The freeware program by French developer Joel Barriere offers a good set of tools and customization options and continually updates the software.
As a general rule, it's best to only use OnyX on a fresh installation of the operating system and not overwrite existing files. Also, it's important to use the version geared for the operating system you're running, as different versions can introduce incompatibilities.
3. Disk Drill
A comprehensive suite of mac repair tools, Disk Drill helps with recovering lost files and preventing future data loss. It can also help you find and eliminate duplicates, clean up the disk space, and optimize your computer's performance. Disk Drill offers a variety of recovery options, including Deleted File Recovery, NTFS/FAT Recover, Photo Recovery, and more. The program can recover files from internal and external hard drives, memory cards, iOS devices, Kindles, and RAID arrays.
Mac Repairs Dundee
The software can even help with recovering data from formatted hard drives, a common cause of file loss. It can also restore files that were emptied from the Recycle Bin or Trash. It can also recover files from corrupted or damaged partitions, enabling you to retrieve deleted or overwritten files. Disk Drill can also help prevent further damage to your drive with features like First Aid and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, which monitors the temperature of your hard drive and alerts you to potential issues before they become critical.
Disk Drill can also recover files from a variety of other sources, including Time Machine backups and third-party iOS apps such as WhatsApp, Viber, and Kik. Moreover, it can create byte-by-byte disk copies to protect against unexpected data loss or drive failure. The program also comes with a sleek modern interface, making it easy to use for both beginners and advanced users.
4. Drive Genius
Drive Genius offers a range of tools to help with mac repair. These include a defrag tool that can defragment files and improve file access times, and a partitioning option that allows the user to manage partitions more efficiently. It can also locate and remove duplicate files, and provides a number of security features that can protect data from unauthorized access. Drive Genius can also scan for hardware related problems, but it is important to note that this will not fix the actual cause of any errors; a drive that is failing may still require replacement.
In addition to these general features, Drive Genius can also create clones of drives and volumes (though it is not able to copy files that are not mounted). The program can also initialize a drive quickly, shred files so they cannot be recovered, and encrypt data on a volume or drive. It can also provide a variety of statistics and information about a drive on both the disk and the partition level.
One interesting feature is the ability to run a continuous monitoring utility called Drive Pulse, which alerts the user to issues like fragmentation and S.M.A.R.T. status changes, but it is not clear what impact this has in practice as the 'Pending' status for my computer remains unchanged after weeks of usage. Additionally, some of the testing and cleaning routines can pause or lag the system, which is a shame as similar routines in other utilities do not.