If your hard disk has ever crashed, you know the feeling of despair that overwhelms you when you realize what's happened. If your hard disk has never crashed, you can count on having this experience. Recently a spate of packages aimed at data and disk recovery has arrived on ihe market. MacTools Deluxe (Central Point), 911 (Microcom), SUM II (Symantec), and now Norton Utilities all take different approaches to the problem. Of the bunch however, SUM and Norton Utilities should be your first choices. Whereas SUM is focused more on data preservation in general, including, as it does, a backup module, Norton Utilities' approach is more clearly focused on disk maintenance and improved performance.
The Doctor Is In
The NDD (Norton Disk Doctor) is the core of the Norton Utilities package. It analyzes and diagnoses a Mac volume. Once it knows what's wrong, it proceeds to fix it, if it can. This is the fundamental philosophical difference between this package and SUM; SUM recovers data from a sick disk: Norton Utilities tries to make the disk better first.
Once you've selected NDD from the main window, you select the volume and then start the scan: three clicks, and you're off. Each time the NDD finds something amiss, it displays a dialog box explaining the problem and offers the option of fixing or not fixing it. Unless you know what you're doing, you should always say yes; the NDD's guesses are good. The NDD checks the integrity of the data structures on a volume and, in its final pass, checks each file on the volume for anomalies.
The speed with which the NDD scans a disk is notable. Larger disks do, of course, take more time, but spending a few minutes per day scanning your volumes to guarantee the state of your data is a small price to pay.
If the NDD is unable to repair the disk, it's time to recover your data and reinitialize it. Norton Utilities’ Format Recover uses several approaches to recover as much of your data as possible. File Saver, an INIT/cdev, stores a copy of a volume’s file system, keeps track of deleted files, and saves Finder Get Info comments, so that they're not lost when you rebuild your Desktop file. Format Recover looks for the File Saver INIT’s files when it's trying to recover your data. File Saver is unobtrusive: you'd never notice it's there.
Unlike SUM II's Shield INIT, File Saver is extremely fast. If you’ve mistakenly initialized (not formatted) a volume on which File Saver’s protection was installed, Format Recover can restore your volume's file system within a few seconds of a File Saver backup.
The only drawback with this scheme — and SUM shares it — is that you will probably lose the work you did since the last time File Saver saved the file system (for example, the last restart or shutdown or the last time you explicitly backed up the information from the File Saver cdev).
Daily Enhancements
Aside from Norton Utilities' recovery capabilities, the package contains several utilities that make daily Mac operation faster. Speed Disk is a disk optimizer, it can analyze a volume and graphically display the distribution of files throughout the volume. It is designed to be as safe as possible to use and is supposed to be able to survive a power cut while optimizing a disk. This safety has a penally, though: Speed Disk's optimizing speed is only average. On the other hand, safe and fast are mutually exclusive features in an optimizer.
Fast Find is a DA dial is a replacement for Apple's File Find DA, but Fast Find is much faster. Searching through 100 megabytes of files takes roughly five seconds. You can search for files by name, type, or creator on multiple volumes.
Directory Assisiance is an INIT that extends standard file-selection dialog boxes. It adds a pop-up menu on either side of the standard volume-name pop-up over the file list. The View menu sets Directory Assistance to display files in the file list by name, date, or type and whether folders should be displayed before, after, or interspersed with files. The File menu lets you delete, duplicate, and get information on Hies; create new folders: and find files. The Find feature is particularly notable, because it uses the same fast-find technology as in the Fast Find DA.
The third application in the Norton package is Layout Plus, a new version of the shareware program Layout. Layout Plus lets you set Finder preferences, such as default window size and placement and default view (by icon, by name, and so on), What's unique about Layout Plus is that it works on a Finder open under MultiFinder; the only caveat is that changes take effect only after a restart.
The Key Finder DA is another replacement for an Apple DA: Key Caps. Key Finder displays the entire character set of the selected font; all you have to do is dick on a character, and Key Finder displays the needed keystrokes.
Finally, DiskLight is an INIT/cdev that displays a small hard-disk icon in a top corner of your screen. This is useful if you have an internal hard disk and can't see its activity LED.
The Bottom Line
The Norton Utilities package provides complete tools for protecting and restoring your data as well as several useful utilities that make using your Mac easier and faster. Anyone who manages multiple Macs or regularly recovers data should have every recovery package on the market for completeness’ sake. For users who are thinking of buying only one of the recovery packages, Norton Utilities for the Macintosh is the one to get.
Somogyi, Stephan. (March 1991). Norton Utilities for the Macintosh. MacUser. (pgs. 46-47).
Peter Norton Computing Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
62 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2019-03-05 / 
ad2f52b621d17801a238bca8c84e51b7246fd2e2 / 
/ 
norton_utilities_1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
