In What Respects Mac is a Better Platform than Windows

It is no surprise that everyone loves the world of Windows. However, when you peek into the latest Mac OS X platform, you will probably do a double take. Listed below are some of the reasons which will make you consider Mac as a better option and put it ahead of Windows. 

How to Create Image of Your Mac OS X Startup Disk Using Apple's Disk Utility

Backups are undoubtedly the best way to keep your data loss woes at bay. They help you keep your data safe and sound on another media that is less vulnerable to failures. The backup media can be used to safely restore all of your mission-critical data that has been lost to a serious disaster. Apple's Disk Utility, which is built into OS X, is a good backup option for Mac users. It works by creating a disk image and then allowing you to restore the entire contents of the disk from the image file. The disk image should be saved on an external hard disk, either FireWire or USB. The image completely replicates the source disk keeping the file attributes (permissions, ACLs, UUIDs) intact.

5 Steps to Speed up Your Mac

The free space on the OS X startup disk is critical to the performance of your Mac. OS X utilises the available space on your boot volume to perform paging. If the startup disk is almost full, you may experience frequent performance hits. To avoid getting into this sort of trouble, you can do plenty of things to free up disk space. Some of them are discussed here in detail:

Four Basic Reasons of Data Loss in Mac

Mac OS X has its roots in UNIX with a different code-base from the one seen in the original Mac OS. It comprises FreeBSD-based services and a Mach 3.0 microkernel. It uses HFS+ as the default file system since inception. Because of the underlying UNIX architecture and ‘Apple-like’ interface, it has been a personal favourite platform of many Mac geek and home users. With OS X, Apple has provided an additional level of usability by going past its ‘proprietary machine’ image in the marketplace. Macs are now compatible with a majority of applications and can even run Windows on the same machine.

Do I Really Need to Backup my Mac?

This question generally comes into the mind of every Mac users. Do I really need to backup?? Yes guys, its the most important part that we usually avoid. If you won't take backup, one day you will surely face the worst possible situation that will be impossible to avoid.  Backup ensures you that your data is safe even if your Mac gets corrupt, hard drive failure, you accidentally delete some data, power failure, or any other severe problem.

Why Apple is providing a free utility “Time Machine”. It saves users from critical conditions of data loss. I found Time Machine the best feature provided by Apple, and the easiest way to take backup. Then why not to take advantage of free utility provided by Apple.

Mac OS X Directory Corruption: The Main Culprit for Data Loss

There are a plethora of things that can corrupt data on your hard drive, such as power outages, disgraceful shutdowns, hardware problems, bad programming, and more. When such events take place on a Mac, you are left with a corrupt hard drive directory that has serious implications for your system. A corrupt directory can potentially damage your files by overwriting them with new data. It can cause some of your files to go missing or being moved to a different location on the drive.

Every item on the OS X drive is represented by catalog records. These records are organized in a B-Tree structure called catalog B-Tree. The information in the directory is built by scanning and searching the catalog B-Tree. If this B-Tree structure gets damaged or the catalog records become corrupt, you will be unable to locate and access files stored on your hard drive.

Boost Up Mac Performance | Speed Up Mac

Mac machine are one of the most used and popular machines in this world. However, at times, Mac machines also go slow with the passage of time. The reasons for slow performance of your Mac computer can be many. To deal with such issue, you can use a third-party software to increase slow Mac PC.

After using a machine for long time, it starts working slower. I also experienced the same situation when I was working on my Mac computer. To explain this, I will discuss about the reasons that slow down the performance of a Mac computer and ways to fix this issue.

How to Recover Deleted Data on Mountain Lion | Mountain Lion Data Recovery

Data loss is the most horrible reality of every Mac user. We delete our data accidentally or intentionally realising later that it is important. With every new release the problem increases. New interface make users to commit more mistakes, resulting in data loss. Newly release OS X Mountain Lion is also giving birth to same problem. Mostly users loss data due to following reasons:

• Upgrading to later version
• Accidental deletion
• Power Failure
• Improper shut-down
• Logical errors
• Continued use after signs of failure, etc.

Mac Does Not Need a Disk Defragmenter - Why?

The ‘Disk Utility’ of Mac can serve various purposes, like managing hard drive partitions of the machine, creating clone or image of the hard drive data, and actively solve various hard drive related issues. This makes the ‘Disk Utility’ a very handy application of Mac aimed to manage hard drives. But, have you ever noticed that this advanced Mac application (Disk Utility) does not have any tool for hard drive defragmentation. Does this make you think why your Mac do not need a defragmenter?

New Features in OS X Mountain Lion

Credit: Apple.com

OS X Mountain Lion came in the market with a bang.  It boosts up every Mac user with a stream of energy with its new and enhanced features. There are number of features that are new and a few with their new and improved  version. Let’s have at look at such great features:

iCloud - It is now more powerful with its enhanced version. Now it works together on a Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad. If you made a change on one, it will automatically update on ones. We uses iCloud to keep our mails, contacts, documents, calendars, notes, etc. All you need to do is use your Apple ID to sign in once and iCloud will be enable in all the applications that use it.

How to Recover Data with Original File Name

There are many softwares available in the market to recover lost Mac data. But do these softwares recover files with their original names?? No. They just create a pile of recovered data giving machine generated names, making it difficult for the user to recognize the file they are looking for. Sometimes there are thousands of files in the recovered bundle and the one you are looking is lost in the way you never find it. Ultimately even after spending thousands of bucks, result is zero.

How to Clean Your Mac | Speed Up Mac | Improve Mac Performance

 I work as a manager in a private bank and use a Mac-based PC at my office. Every time I use my Mac computer, I tend to run 8 to 10 applications on it and at times, it works very slowly that I have to forcibly shutdown the system. Then I realized that I should restart the computer once but the performance of the system was same even after restarting. When this did not help me, I performed a search on the Internet to speed up my Mac PC. Here are some of tips to optimize Mac system:

• Clean Startup Items

In Mac, some of the applications automatically set themselves as startup application. This causes them to load at every start. To avoid this, you should regularly remove startup items from ‘Login Items’. 

How to Make Your Mac Ready for Mountain Lion

Apple's new version for Mac OS X i.e. Mountain Lion is going to release this July, and the long wait of  Mac users is going to end. But is your Mac prepared to welcome new OS?

Though Apple hasn't released the detailed specifications on the system requirements for Mountain Lion, specifications as per developer releases recommended that your Mac should be one of the following models in order to run Mountain Lion:

• iMac (mid-2007 or newer) 
• MacBook (late 2008 Aluminum, or early 2009 or newer) 
• MacBook Pro (mid/late 2007 or newer) 
• MacBook Air (late 2008 or newer) 
• Mac Mini (early 2009 or newer) 
• Mac Pro (early 2008 or newer) 

How to Resolve 'Overlapped Extent Allocation' Issue in Mac OS X

Apple’s Disk Utility can perform a range of disk-related tasks in Mac OS X. This inbuilt tool allows verifying a disk’s identity. If errors are found, it repairs the disk to fix the damage. You may come across the following error while performing a repair using Disk Utility:

‘overlapped extent allocation’

The term ‘overlapped extent allocation’ implies that two files are stored on the same area of your hard disk. This condition indicates that you have already lost some of your data stored on the disk. You may try to fix the issue using any of the following methods:

How Disk Utility Verifies and Repairs Permissions

Disk Utility is an Apple's inbuilt tool that facilitates a variety of disk-related tasks, such as creation of disk images, mounting or unmounting hard disks, enabling journaling, etc. Apart from these functions, Disk Utility can help you verify and repair your Mac OS X disks. It also allows verifying and repairing disk permissions to resolve a range of application errors. Let us delve deeper into the process followed by Disk Utility to check file permissions.

A majority of installations done in Mac OS X are typically done through package files (the files with '.pkg' extension). For every installation done from a package file in Mac OS X 10.5 or earlier, an associated 'Bill of Materials' (.'bom') file is created and stored in the '/Library/Receipts/' folder. These files consume a small amount of disk space. Every '.bom' file includes a list of files that were installed by the package. These files also contain proper permissions for each installed file.

Tips to Avoid Hard Drive Corruption and Fine-tune Your Mac OS X

Facing intermittent disk corruption issues is perhaps the worst part of the life of a Mac user. In order to mitigate the risks of unexpected data disasters, user carry out routine maintenance of their hard disk drives. Maintenance typically involves implementing a comprehensive backup strategy and performing regular updates for all third-party software installed on your computer. Maintenance is often confused with troubleshooting and is not limited to these basic steps. Digging deeper into this concern, you will find a plethora of solutions to get your drive in good working order. You can perform cache cleaning, disk defragmentation, permissions repair, and update prebinding to avert potential hard drive problems and squeeze best performance from your Mac system.

Cache Cleaning:
A routine cleanup of your System and User cache files is the best remedy to fix a lot of issues in Mac. This process may help to remove all the inconsistent or corrupt information in your cache files. Corrupt caches could a major source of trouble for Mac users.

How to Minimize Risks of Data loss and Corruption in Mac OS X

Mac OS X systems offer enhanced stability and reliability. But after a prolonged usage, these factors tend to fade out and give rise to a number of serious problems, such as data corruption and loss. The potential causes of data corruption range from power outages causing unexpected shutdowns, to system software bugs because of bad programming, to critical hardware issues, such as bad sectors, bad RAM, etc. These factors may cause corruption in the hard drive directory. As a consequence, you may notice files being overwritten or several files missing from the system.

File System Journaling has helped to address the issue of directory corruption and thus, avoid data loss. However, this technique is not always fruitful. Additionally, if you have corrupt system files due to several failed software updates, you may encounter frequent kernel panics on your Mac. In order to easily avoid cases of data loss and corruption, you can follow the below mentioned strategies:

Mac File Recovery after Volume Corruption

Most users have a hard time nailing down corruption on their Mac hard drives. This is primarily due to the nature of disk corruption in Mac OS X. It might occur subtly causing damage to your data and various applications installed in the system. If this corruption is left unchecked, it would spread over your entire drive paving way for data loss and other similar problems. The potential causes of hard drive corruption in Mac include hardware failures, system crashes, third-party software application conflicts, power outages, faulty drivers, and bad sectors on the disk. In such circumstances, it is worthwhile to use a clean, updated backup to restore all the lost or inaccessible drive data. If you do not have a good drive backup, you should go for Mac recovery using advanced third-party software.

When Mac Hard Drive Get Crashed

OS X Hard Drive

It is the most important component of OS X and is a non-volatile storage media that provides safe and reliable data storage. It comprise of various logical components to store, retrieve, manage, and manipulate your precious data. For proper functioning of your Mac OS X computer, it is required for the hard drive components to perfectly perform the assigned task.

Hard Drive Crash Reasons- Mainly Due to Logical Components

However, in some cases, the logical components of your hard drive may get damaged and hard drive crashes. When you hard drive crashes, there could be a serious problem with the logical components of the storage media.

Clone Mac Drive- Best Backup Utility

Organizations facing massive data growth strive for an effective information management solution in order to keep away from potential risks of data loss, they consider backups as one of the most fundamental needs of the business. Cloning is a better option to make complete data backups of individual drives of each user workstation. There are a range of real-time benefits associated with drive cloning. It helps to reduce the overall management costs and creates a platform to plan out backup and recovery operations. It also increases the organization's potential to effectively deal with crucial instances of data outage or loss.

How can I copy my Mac disk to external drive

I usually stuck into the situations which lead me nowhere as i am left with no data. Such horrible situations generally arises because of some common reasons:

• Boot drive got corrupt.
• Upgrading to later version.
• Accidentally delete boot partition.

To overcome such critical situations where even boot drive is corrupt, the best solution is to create copy(clone) of Mac disk to external drive.  And the best part is, the clone of drive enables you to work even if you loose access to Operating System or system get crashed.

How to Restore Lost Files In Mac

Solution comes before Query. No question is generated in this world that can't be answered. As question don't have a solution, but solution have a question.  And the same philosophy goes when the question arises of restoring lost files in Mac. 

The situation arises because of many reasons, like hard drive corruption, drive go missing,  corrupted preferences files, etc. And we all got stuck into the situation assuming our data got lost and can't be recovered. But as we discussed, everything have some solution, so do this problem.

For restoring our lost data we need to use data recovery utilities like Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery.  The software recovers data 3 simple steps:

Time Machine Backup- Not Visible

Are you using Mac Time Machine believing it’s the safest option for backup?? Let me put light on one of the issues that you should be aware of before using it. Though it’s a great option to backup, what if backup is not visible? 

The problem arises because of many reasons like:

• External drive got corrupt or is inaccessible.
• Time Machine got corrupt, eventually and inevitably.
• External drive doesn't run on any other system etc.

How to Recover Mac Data when Disk Image Got Corrupt?

Is your major concern is regarding your data safety? Do you have your most important data stored in your Mac? If 'Yes', then you should go for the most safest option of data backup. And one of the best way of taking backup is by creating image of your hard drive. Creating disk image in Mac OS X is the easiest and fastest process, that protects your treasure of data from any kind of data loss situation.

You can say Disk image itself is a file, which comprise all the files and directories, and the structure of hard drive as well. It contains each bit of  entire hard drive , thus creating a perfect replica of the drive. It is the most commanding way, that diminishes the need of Mac Data Recovery.

Re-installation Options in Mac OS X

There are many reasons that leads us nowhere except reinstalling Mac OS X, like  operating system malfunction, system crash, removing system errors or upgrading to higher version. We come across various options to do the operation. Some of them may leads us to worst situation of data loss as they need hard drive formatting. In such cases, reinstalling operating system, needs to run Mac Data Recovery utilities on formatted drive to recover lost data.

Below are the three reinstallation options, out of which we need to select one as per  our requirement and condition:

Lots of Desktop Files can Slow Down your Mac

Desktop is not a showcase for displaying beautiful icons, neither its a garbage bin to dump all the applications on.  Its a place that should be handle with most care, as carelessness with it affects your Mac performance.

Now, what do you get by caring your desktop?  It simply means, not to over-clutter it with lots of files and folders. Every single icon on desktop is a small limpid window with graphic i.e icon inside. That means, if you have 100 icons on desktop you have 100 open windows, each one filching some memory.

Repair Startup Disk with Apple’s Disk Utility

The most obvious benefit that all Mac users enjoy is the ability to perform 'Live verification' of their computer's startup volume using the inbuilt Apple's Disk Utility. However, this feature can be only used with Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)-formatted (HFS+J) volumes. When you run Disk Utility to perform Live Verification, your system may appear slow and some applications may take a longer time than usual to start. If the Disk Utility reports errors, you will have to boot your computer using the Mac OS X bootable DVD and again run Disk Utility to repair those errors.

Clone Mac Hard Drive to Backup your Data

There are many different types of data storage media available, but the internal hard drive of your Laptop or Desktop is the primary media that stores majority of your entire data. Even if you take backup of the data in your Mac hard drive, still before transferring data to the backup drive all your data lies in the hard drive memory.


In this context, if you are in the middle of a work and the Mac hard drive, containing all your precious data fails, the work will be ceased. However, in such a situation of data loss or inaccessibility, having a clone copy of your drive using any Mac Drive Clone utility can be immensely helpful in restoring the data and continuing the on-going work.

Easy Ways to Recover Mac Data

Data loss or hard drive crash is one of the most common problems that everyone faces at some time. It can be because of various reasons and situation like accidental deletion, physical damage, logical error, power failure etc. 

Below are the given possible ways to recover lost data back.

Process to recover data when hard drive boots

An Overview on Slow Performance of Mac

All of us hate slow performance of our beloved Mac, but no matter how effective and efficient our Mac is, there comes a time when it becomes sluggish and starts taking too much time even performing simplest task. At this situation we all want to look up for the reasons of slow Mac and definitely possible ways to fix this issue. Let us understand the possible reasons behind the slow performance of Mac:

• Too many unused items on the dashboard: A cluttered dashboard is one of the major causes of slow performance of Mac. Since, all these widgets which are present on the dashboard of your Mac use memory and every time when you start Mac they load thus decrease the performance of Mac.

Reliable and user-friendly Mac utilities to manage partitions

Logical partitions in a Mac hard drive helps in storing different categories of data separately. At the purchase level, the Mac hard drive has just one single volume so that you can make as many partitions or volumes in the drive as per your requirement. Apart from creating or adding new partitions to the hard drive, there can be many other needs, such as deletion of unwanted volume, formatting of the unwanted content in a volume, increasing or decreasing the size of any volume etc. In order to perform these operations and manage Mac partitions with ease, there are many Mac utilities available in the current market.

Enhanced and Improved Utilities in DriveToolBox2

Wipe: After erasing data, we can still recover it as data is still there on hard drive. What if you have confidential data and can't take any risk of its recovery? In this case Wipe is your Saviour. It completely wipes out your data from memory beyond recovery and protects you from prying eyes.

Drive Initializer: It helps you format your hard drive in appropriate way and enables you to create new partitions in HFS+ or FAT 32 format but make sure to take backup before formatting your drive. As per your requirement you can choose GUID partition, Apple partition and Master Boot Record. This module can help you convert your Intel based Mac hard drive to Apple partition to make it compatible with Power PC.

What’s New in Drive ToolBox2?

                                                                                                                                                 Drive ToolBox2

SpeedUp Mac:  Efficiently removes all the unwanted files and applications that eats up system performance by consuming a quality space. These are cache files, log files, junk files, universal binaries, duplicate files etc. SpeedUp Mac optimize free space by removing clutter i.e. removes the basic obstacle between you and your Mac in order to make your Mac run at the speed it used to be in the beginning.

A Pack of 12 Mac Utilities to Keep Mac Healthy | Stellar Drive ToolBox2

Stellar drive Toolbox for Mac OS X is now with advanced utilities in its new version. Drive ToolBox2 is comprehensive software to maintain and manage your Mac in the best way. It is a combination of 12 different utilities and a free bonus utility to optimize your drive performance, managing partitions, repairing corrupt volume, defragging fragmented hard drive, wiping data beyond recovery, encrypting confidential data etc.

 

New flavor in MacWorld | iWorld 2012 for Mac Addicts- OS X ZONE

All Mac users.. Its high time for you all as MacWorld | iWorld is coming with its all new fascination. All Mac users desperately wait for this event to occur for whole year. So hold your breath as MacWorld is going to be organized from 26th to 28th January, San Fransisco.

New flavor in MacWorld | iWorld 2012 is the exclusive OS X Zone. It is a specified floor area specially designed to showcase OS X Developers, the most exclusive class for MacWorld | iWorld mob every year. This area provides an Unparalleled Promotional Exposure to present your software with Minimum cost and maximum exposure.

Crap Remover and Performance Booster- SpeedUp Mac

Are you aware of files in your Mac eating up your system performance?? Let me tell u. There are Cache Files, Log Files, Junk Files etc. Such files and applications halt the System Performance and occupies a Quality Space. After a certain period of time our system go slow and we people think that its because our system is growing old but there is nothing like that, its because of these unwanted Files and Applications.

SpeedUp Mac by Stellar efficiently Removes Clutter, Enhance System Performance and Optimize free space. The software works both as a cleaner and uninstaller.

Basically there are 3 Options:

SpeedUp Now: It is a complete booster for your System. It is used to clean your whole System. Old large Files, duplicate Files, universal binaries, log files, cache/temporary Files etc. consumes your drive space. Moreover, SpeedUp Mac enables you to backup your files before removing them from the Hard Drive. You can also discard or include a particular file type.

Clean My Mac: It enables you to clean a particular volume. As in SpeedUp Now you can not select  a volume, is the major difference between two. This feature works on individual Mac volumes and enables you to gain considerable amount of disk space.

Uninstaller: It removes all avoidable applications, widgets and plug-ins that exist in the system . You can simply drag or drop an application that you want to remove into 'Application Uninstaller Area' or choose from the list of applications.

Widgets and plugins eats up a lot of space contributing in slowing down System Performance. Some widgets keep on running even when you’re not using your dashboard and some plugins got automatically downloaded without your knowledge. Uninstaller scans the entire drive listing out all the widgets and plugins, thus enabling us to delete the unwanted ones.

Some Important features

• Scheduler: Scheduler in Preferences enables you to run the software at particular intervals, say 1 week, it will scan your Mac and list all the unwanted files and applications. And its totally upon you to delete those files that you feel are not required. 
• Advance: It is basically to alert you that your Trash is full. By default max limit is 1GB but you can set it upto 5GB, and when trash exceed that limit a message will pop up to clean your trash.
• Devices: If you connect any external device to your Mac it will scan that device and delete the junk and binary files from it.

Mac Data Recovery Under Error 43

File system is one of the important parts of the computer hard drive. It stores all the details of the volumes and the data areas on the hard drive. Without the file system, it is not possible to access any file from the hard drive memory by its name. Hence, for smooth functioning of the system, the file system must be in good health. In Mac, there are different types of file systems, such as – HFS, HFS+, HFS Wrapper etc. Sometimes, due to unexpected system shut sown, software or hardware contradiction etc, the file system becomes corrupt and all the data in the hard drive becomes totally inaccessible. In such situations, you need to opt for any Mac recovery software to recover the lost/inaccessible data back.

At times, once the file system has already got corrupt, though the system may boot, some files/folders can not be accessed. While trying to open such files, you may come across various error messages. One of the error messages that you may have received can be as below:

“- 43 error (File not found, Folder not found)”

The error message indicates that the operating system has failed to locate the content of the file, you are looking for. The reason behind the problem is the corruption to the directory structure, which has led to this problem.

Apart from this, Error code -43 is usually encountered while trying to connect any Windows share or copying files to/from the Windows share through Mac. Here, the cause behind the problem can be any of the below -

• Illegal characters in the file name, which are not supported by Windows
• Insufficient permissions for accessing the SharePoint by connecting your SMB server through a URL, which contains the name of that SharePoint server.

Resolution:

If you have received the problem, while accessing any Windows share, then resolve the problem by trying out the following:

• Remove the characters from the file name, which Windows do not support. The characters can be - ?, [, ], /, \, =, +, <, >, ;, :, " ,, | and *.
• Don't use the share name in the URL; instead use only the server name.

However, if you are having the problem, while working on your normal Mac system, then the problem is related to a severely damaged directory structure. You can try repairing the corrupt directory structure by running 'Disk Utility'. If Disk Utility fails, you need to format the system hard drive and make fresh partitions in it. In such a condition, you need to restore the formatted data from a valid backup. In the absence of an updated backup, any Mac recovery software can only help you recover the lost data back.

These Mac data recovery utilities are immensely powerful and recover the lost data efficiently. At the same time, these utilities are completely read-only in their recovery operation and with graphical user interfaces, quite easy-to-use.