No Norton SystemWorks for Mac Pro?

Question

In 2 days I will receive my Mac Pro 3.0 GHz and having been a very happy user of Norton SystemWorks 3.0 and Norton Utilities for 6 years, I'm concerned about Symantec not having a Universal upgrade. In those 6 years I never lost a single file and my machine worked great because of Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk. Please, does anybody know of any similar software as reliable as Norton? Please help, this is very important. Thanks

Answer 1

I agree, Norton has been a headache for us Mac users. It used to be good and we needed it, but now it's really a pain in our collective butts and obsolete.
The new method for keeping a machine up and running is called "cloning", which software is used to image the boot drive to another, which one disconnects and keeps safe. (copying all files doesn't work)
This way if something, like the OS hangs or the drive fails, one can hook up the clone and hold option and boot right off it like nothing happened. One can then repair/recover/even reverse clone back onto the original drive. Downtime is minimal. Your whole drive clone is done in minutes for 250GB drives on Firewire 800. Some auto clone software will only change the updates, making it even faster.
The best free info I've found for cloning is over at the Carbon Copy Cloner forums, their "before you clone" is very helpful. I advise Erase w/Zero all brand new drives one time to eliminate any possible bad sectors before your data is laid by the driver software and found out too late the sector is bad.
Of course a Mac Intel version of cloning software must be used.
Also search Apple for DejaVu, they are supposed to come out with a Intel version soon. It's a System Preference pane that combines auto-cloning/auto-backup and does it's thing even if your logged out and/or over a network. Very Sweet.
Once your cloning properly, like before installation, experiment or auto-weekly, your going to find out that a lot of these "utilites" are really a wasted effort. You'll immeditalty just grab the clone, option boot off it and grab your files and reverse clone. Go out to lunch while the cloning is going on. It's really painless and a lifesaver if the drive dies one morning or you need to "go back" to a earlier version of the OS before it broke a app on you.
Also by reverse cloning the whole drive, your automatically optimizing and defragmenting your boot drive (the files that didn't get done by Mac OS X automatically) . Do option boot the clone to check it carefully before reverse cloning of course.
I second OnyX too, cheap, effective and cleans everything out if need be, like a corupted cache for instance.
Again make sure your using MacTel versions.