MacFixIt on Filling the Norton Utilities gap

Ted Landua of MacFixIt fame, has posted this month's editorial on Filling the Norton Utilities gap. My original response to only reading the title of Landau's article was: "There's a gap?" In the first paragraph, Landau points out how OS X makes any maintenance beyond the tools included with the OS (like Disk Utility) rather unnecessary, but continues on anyway, noting: "Even so, it pays to be prepared. That's why I would still recommend having at least one repair utility, beyond First Aid, in your troubleshooting arsenal."

Looking for a replacement for the now defunct Mac version of Norton Utilities, Landau points to Drive Genius. According to the Drive Genius product page, the software is "packed with powerful tools such as a drive optimizer, a comprehensive repair facility for analyzing, repairing and rebuilding volumes, plus excellent testing capabilities with media surface scanning, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking.... Drive Genius features advanced tools for resizing and moving of volumes without reformatting, and sports a sector editing tool to modify the data on any sector of the drive — powerful features that will satisfy even the seasoned Mac experts." Sounds cool, and there is a demo available, in case you want to give the program a test run before dropping $99 USD for a single-user license.

My take: save yourself the $99, use the free utilities built into OS X, and just backup your data on a regular basis. When everything goes south (it inevitably always does), reformat / replace drive, and restore.