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Troubleshooting utility news and updates

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. This week there were updates for a couple of data-recovery programs and a couple of popular maintenance utilities.

Topher Kessler MacFixIt Editor
Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs and Apple hardware at home and in the workplace.
Topher Kessler
2 min read

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a couple of data-recovery programs and a couple of popular maintenance utilities.

Data recovery
Stellar Phoenix is a company that develops a number of recovery programs for OS X, including the standard Data Recovery program and the newer Photo Recovery tools for identifying and restoring files that have been deleted or otherwise lost from a variety of media, including hard drives and flash drives for cameras.

The latest version of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery includes support for new file formats (MOS, PSP, and PCT) as well as new formats for video and audio files including some popular ones like MKV, DIVX, VOB, and OGM files. The utility also has an auto-update feature built into the program. In addition, Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery was updated to tweak its "Quick Recovery" feature to offer greater support for sparse bundle disk images.

Both utilities are free to try, but the Photo Recovery utility will cost $39 for a license, and the Data Recovery tool will cost $99 per license.

Maintenance
Beyond the Stellar Phoenix updates are two updates for maintenance tools. TechTool Pro is a popular hardware diagnostics utility that can check the health of hard drives, memory, CPU functions, and other aspects of the system. The latest version addresses a number of bugs with the tools when handling dual-GPU Macs, as well as Macs that have custom setups including more than 24GB of RAM, headless operation, and those using SAS drives and Apple's hardware RAID controllers. TechTool Pro costs $99 for a license.

The last update is for the popular maintenance package Onyx, which has been in beta development for the past few weeks. The latest update is yet another beta release for the software, which improves on the already-implemented changes including improved handling of browser contents (caches, cookies, history, etc.) as well as options to manage system memory usage. OnyX is free software.



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