When you talk about Apple’s Disk Utility, the very first thought in your mind is to repair a disk. Disk Utility is indeed a built-in, all-in-one tool for Mac that can perform a range of disk-related tasks, such as verifying a disk’s integrity, creating or compressing disk images, mounting or unmounting disks, formatting or partitioning disks, cloning hard drive volumes, etc. Professional Mac users find this tool helpful in overcoming all problems with the OS X hard drive. On the contrary, the inexperienced users are advised to keep their distance from the tool in order for avoiding any scary result. Disk Utility can be found in ‘Utilities’ inside your ‘Applications’ folder.

Source:Wikipedia

When you open Disk Utility, it will recognize everything attached to your system and list it on the left. You can select a drive from the left pane to view the relevant information, such as file system, owners, number of folders, etc. One of the much needed functions of Disk Utility is ‘Repair Disk Permissions’. This is a common fix for all problems in Mac. Each file on your OS X hard drive belongs to a particular owner. The OS X decides what file permissions should be granted to other users. The operating system records appropriate permissions for every file in a secret file inside the ‘/Library/Receipts’ folder. Due to frequent upgrades, installations, or un-installations, the actual file permissions get damaged. As a consequence, you may experience all kinds of untraceable issues on your Mac. Disk Utility helps you to correct these permissions and get your system back to a consistent state.

Besides the repair functions, Disk Utility has a lot more to offer. Mac Disk Utility allows you to set up a Mirrored RAID for backup purpose or a Striped RAID for handling performance issues. It is essential for you to create a Mirrored RAID, if you do not wish to lose information after a drive failure. Using the ‘Restore’ function of Disk Utility, you can easily copy the entire contents of your drive to a different media. To add to the efficacy of this tool, you can create an identical image of your hard drive. You can also image an external drive or a CD/DVD. The toolbar provides you with options to mount or unmount drives, enable journaling, burn a disk image to CD/DVD, and more.

Disk Utility is a multi-purpose tool for working with Mac hard disks. However, it is one of the most underrated utilities for Mac OS X. A knowledgeable user can take full advantage of this tool and use it to easily get away with all the OS X hard drive issues.

Bio: Vishal is an expert writer and has published various articles on usefulness of Mac’s Disk Utility. He also encourage Mac users to try out the latest utilities developed for Mac OS X which ensures smooth running of the system, handles partitioning, cloning and defragging of the drive.

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Posted in Mac OS X