a review by Tom Piper
I often preach about computer volume protection, with the first rule being the establishment of multiple backup volumes. Yet, even backups get corrupted, and boot drives fail to boot . . . this is when you need reliable data assistance to bring back those precious files. You also need reliable tools to maintain the health of these volumes, and shield them from prying eyes, even to the point of safely deleting data when a drive is retired. I’ve been using Stellar products for many years, and their latest release does it all and more.
Stellar Drive ToolBox 3 is an all-in-one package of Mac tools to optimize Mac OS X and speed up its performance. This easy-to-use Mac optimization application offers various indispensable modules in a single bundle, which is very useful in day-to-day maintenanceof your Mac. With 14 included modules, I can repair corrupt Mac volumes, resize Mac volumes without data loss, wipe unwanted data beyond recovery, monitor Mac hard drives, find large files and duplicates, and do many other tasks to improve my experience with my Mac.
- Drive Monitor keeps track of the health status of my hard drive to know about any impending failures and avoid data loss
- Smart Finder searches particular files and folders on my Mac and performs the desired actions
- Benchmark checks the performance level of my hard drive and compares it with other systems
- Smart Mac Care runs different modules of the application at a convenient time
- SpeedUp Mac improves the performance of my slow Mac by removing unwanted files, applications, widgets and plug-ins
- Wipe completely erases unwanted, personal, and sensitive data from my Mac’s hard drives (when needed), beyond the scope of recovery
- Drive Defrag enhances system performance by defragmenting severely fragmented Mac hard drives, volumes or large files
- Volume Repair verifies and repairs corrupt Mac volumes, without any further damage
- Drive Clone creates clone or image of the selected Mac drive, volume, or region and helps restore lost data
- Partition Manager manages Mac partitions with the options to add, delete, format, resize, hide, and reveal Mac volumes
- Drive Initialize initializes my raw Mac hard drives with the required partition scheme and file system
- Raw Data Editor manually repairs minor volume corruptions by editing file structure of the drive
- Shield keeps a backup image of the hard drive according to the defined schedule and helps restoring lost data
- Data Encryptor prevents unwanted access to my confidential data by encrypting and hiding files or folders
In actual operation, the interface is informative, yet simple to navigate. Similar to Apple’s Cover Flow view, the active window allows me to click on a right or left arrow to select the module I need to use, while providing a quick overview between the arrows describing the selected modules primary functions. Once selected, the subsequent detailed explanation allows me to Continue, or go Back (or get Help for even more description), then proceeds into selecting volumes, folders, options and information which is graphically pleasing and intellectually informative. In a note of caution, some functions can be very time-consuming, particularly when analyzing file and folder information (like duplicates and disk usage). It can also be daunting when getting the message “Drive Refreshing Please wait...” which stops program access until its done.
All in all, this is a wonderful collection of many of the most popular utilities, most of which are offered individually by other companies, which means more money and more hassle to track everything. The combined convenience and powerful products makes for a very attractive package in an easy-to-use format. Its comforting to be able to schedulemany of these activities so that they work in the background, in a manner that I prescribe, but don’t have to think about too often.
When I have any questions regarding Stellar products and services, I am welcome to call their Technical Team at the USA Helpline using 877-778-6087 (numbers are also available in other countries like Britain and Australia). There is also email access to the Team as well.
Stellar Drive ToolBox 3 is available in a boxed DVD for $99.00 from www.drivetoolbox.com (a technician version also available for $349). If you want to try it out before buying, a free demo download and evaluation version at the same website allows you to preview this products first.
Stellar offers a broad spectrum of other recovery software for Mac, Windows and other platforms, plus a hard drive or CD/DVD recovery service worldwide. This is a robust company with fine products that have been fully developed and are very reliable.
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