Macworld is host to three major utility announcements for OS X: disk testing and repair with the shipment of Micromat’s Drive 10, the preview of the long-awaited Roxio Toast Titanium for X for data and music CD burning, and the announcement of Retrospect 5 for OS X for backup.
OS X gets serious with utilities from Micromat, Dantz, and Roxio
Macworld is host to three major utility announcements for OS X: disk testing and repair with the shipment of Micromat’s Drive 10, the preview of the long-awaited Roxio Toast Titanium for X for data and music CD burning, and the announcement of Retrospect 5 for OS X for backup.
Micromat’s Drive 10 is here now, the first commercial drive utility available for OS X. Those of you at the show can pick it up for a show special of $52.59 at booth 1337 (list price $69.95). Incorporating technologies from TechTool Pro, Drive 10 features disk repair and recovery on HFS and HFS+ drives, as well as automatic backup of volume stucture data to aid in recovery. Drive 10’s test suite includes hardware diagnostics, surface scan, and volume structure tests, among others. The software features a gorgeous Aqua interface with a very slick magnification effect as the tests run: this may be the first drive utility you’ll want to watch as it works!
Also available now is the preview edition of Roxio’s Toast Titanium 5 for OS X, free to current users of Toast Titanium 5. The beta release will enable recording of audio CDs, and, for the first time on OS X, data CDs and DVDs, though it lacks some of the full feature set of Toast under OS 9. The software, which expires after 90 days, can be downloaded right now from http://www.roxio.com/toastbeta. Roxio also confirmed with Go2Mac that the finished product will in fact be free to Titanium 5 owners.
If that hasn’t put you into OS X bliss, there’s still more good news: Dantz has formally announced it will bring its next version of its backup utility Retrospect to OS X, as well as OS 9. Version 5.0, scheduled for release this fall, will run natively under both OS 9 and OS X. OS X versions will include not only the full version of Retrospect Desktop (list $149), but Workgroup Backup (list $299) and Server Backup (list $499) for ASIP and Mac OS X Server, all the way down to the home user-friendly Retrospect Express Backup (list $49).
Stay tuned to Go2Mac for upcoming reviews of these products as we get them, and more product news from Macworld New York.
