Norton Utilities for Macintosh (NUM) 3.1, the long-awaited upgrade to Symantec’s flagship data-protection and -recovery utility, is leaner, meaner, and faster than ever before. Yet, though built on the solid foundation of NUM 2.0.6 and bolstered by Public Utilities 2.0, NUM 3. 1 is surprisingly uneven.
Prevention and Cure
A six-button palette gives access to Norton Disk Doctor, UnErase, Volume Recover, Speed Disk, Norton Fastback, and System Info. These and more are also accessible from the Utilities menu.
No single disk-repair utility is best at everthing, but Norton Disk Doctor leads the current pack. It checks volume directories for corruption, which it can usually correct. It also cures minor file anomalies and media damage. The new version finds and fixes problems that NUM 2 and MacTools’ DiskFix don’t even detect, and is much faster than both.
The FileSaver control panel creates invisible files that NUM uses to restore damaged directories and recover deleted files. The new Prevention feature checks for directory damage at start-up, at shutdown, and/or after idle time. FileSaver can also check for media damage and inform you of the need to optimize or back up. When it spots a problem, an alert flashes and prescribes the appropriate NUM module — an excellent feature, as the best use of NUM is fixing small problems before they become big ones.
When Disk Doctor can’t fix a volume, it sends you to Volume Recover, which offers to restore the volume “in place” based on a FileSaver directory “snapshot.” In my tests, it worked flawlessly and fast. Note, however, that because you might have a snapshot of an already corrupted directory and because backup directory files are themselves subject to corruption, it’s safer if you first recover files, then attempt to repair or restore the volume. Both the NUM manual and program stress repair and restoration first — expedient, but a bit imprudent.
UnErase can recover files from a damaged volume or rescue files that have been deleted from the Trash. Of this module’s several new features, most welcome are the ability to sort scan results by degree of recoverability and the option to filter unrecoverable files.
However, the new UnErase omits some features that were in NUM 2. This simplifies the interface and the everyday recovery of trashed files, but it poses big problems for big data-recovery jobs. If you have complete, current backups, these omissions won’t affect you, but they reduce NUM’s value as a serious datarecovery tool — something for which it used to be the best commercial option.
Backing Up
Your first line of defense against data loss should always be backups; repair and recovery are steps to take when disaster strikes between backups or when backups fail. But if I had to use Norton Fastback, which replaces the older Norton Backup ... well, I wouldn’t. To start with, it’s not backward-compatible; you need to keep Backup around to access pre-Fastback files. This might be acceptable if Fastback were clearly superior, but it isn’t.
On the plus side, Fastback adds support for tape drives, self-extracting backup files, backups in standard Finder file format, and error correction. In the minus column, Fastback can back up changed files only for entire volumes, not custom sets of files. If you attempt two types of backups for a volume, Fastback “forgets” the first one. You can’t view or edit a set. Fastback can’t create sets of multiple volumes; you can run single-volume sets in sequence, but Fastback rewinds tapes to the top and searches for free space within each set, which can add hours to such routines. In short, Fastback is the wrong choice for a package promising “comprehensive data protection.”
Speed Disk, Norton’s disk optimizer, is speedier than ever, especially on Power Macs (thanks to native code). The improved interface lets you select multiple volumes and see the total number of files and the percentage of fragmentation per volume. You can choose which files to defragment from a list of fragmented files giving size and number of fragments.
Gone is a nasty bug from version 3.0 capable of damaging large numbers of files, but there’s still a risky conflict with FWB’s Hard Disk ToolKit; the fix is in HDT 1.3.1 and later versions.
Norton Disk Editor gets down to the lowest logical level of your data and disk structures. This is a technician’s tool that most users will never need, but sometimes it’s your only way to rescue a damaged file, or even an entire disk. The new Disk Editor has a smoother interface, templates for more areas of the disk, and more power to copy and paste between sectors.
Norton Security
Normally, when you delete a file, the system simply modifies the entry in the directory to indicate available space; the data itself remains on the disk. That’s why NUM can recover deleted files — and how file security can be breached. Wipe Info makes sure a file, folder, or disk can’t be recovered, by writing over the data up to three times. You can also create a Wipe Info Trash for drag-and-drop “shredding.” (At press time Symantec was addressing a bug in Wipe Info that causes some Macs to crash.)
NUM 3.1 finishes off with a handful of lightweight utilities such as Startup Disk Builder, System Info, and Floppier — some new and some carried over from NUM 2. None are so compelling or so weak that they should influence your buying decision one way or another. However, this version of NUM doesn’t support System 6; if you haven’t upgraded to System 7, stick with NUM 2.
The Last Word
A utility collection such as NUM should be strong in all major departments. Had Symantec left well enough alone with UnErase and included a first-rate backup module, that would have clinched it. Instead, NUM is neck and neck with the competition: Symantec’s own, patchy MacTools 3.0 (4.0 came out at press time). Still, for its best features I recommend NUM 3.1 highly.
Stoller, Peter M. (February 1995). Norton Utilities for Macintosh 3.1. Macworld. (pg. 63).
Symantec Corporation
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norton_3.1.3.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
