What is SD! doing to my backup volume?

[RobLewis]

As an experiment, I ran DiskWarrior 4.2 on my backup volume. It found some minor problems and fixed them.

Then I did a Smart Backup of my boot drive to the volume, then immediately ran DiskWarrior again. Here's what it reported:

• 5 files had a directory entry with an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired.
• 2 folders had a directory entry with an incorrect custom icon flag that was repaired.
• The Root Creation Date was repaired.
• Critical values in the Volume Information were incorrect and were repaired.

I'm not too concerned with the first 2 reports, but the last 2 are a bit troubling (I suspect they may both refer to the same issue, since isn't the Root Creation Date part of the Volume Information?)

Is it possible that SD! just cheerfully copied wrong information from the source drive? Is there any way it could fix bogus information instead of propagating it?

[dnanian]

We've actually discussed these kinds of issues with the Alsoft people, and these particular errors aren't really problems. The vast majority are things that just aren't relevant in the OS X days, and can't be copied with standard file APIs... the "root creation date" is because the file system was copied from a drive that was formatted at a different time (obviously, since they're different drives), and yes - the last is the same error.

[RobLewis]

Thanks.

Frankly, I'm a little suspicious of the makers of ALL disk repair utilities. It's in their interest to inflate the severity of any minor problems they find, in order to make it seem like their product really saved your bacon and is therefore worth buying and continuing to upgrade.

Not that DiskWarrior hasn't saved my bacon a couple of times; I suspect they're just a little extreme in their rhetoric. After all, Apple's Disk Utility reported no problems with the volume.

[dnanian]

Disk Warrior is a good tool with a very hard task: their intention is to ensure that any given volume is consistent with what very old versions of OS 7 expect. So, things like "text encoding values" aren't relevant these days... but are to OS 7.

So, they're basically just trying to be thorough, and meet their goals. That doesn't mean their logging is easy for people to interpret, or that it's relevant to an OS X user.