Phone Disk, from Macroplant, is a utility for Mac OS X (and Windows) that runs quietly in the background on your computer until you plug-in an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad using a USB sync cable. Plugging in your favorite iDevice causes Phone Disk to seamlessly mount the iOS file system on that device to your computers file system. Once mounted you can directly access the files on that device using Finder (and Windows explorer) or any other program.
You’ll be interested in this application if you’re an IT Ninja looking for another good troubleshooting utility to carry around or you’re simply curious about the data that resides on your favorite iDevice.
What’s Good?
- Phone Disk automatically and seamlessly integrates iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad file system to the Mac OS X Finder.
- Mac OS X file system integration allows your to preview, open, edit, and save photos, documents, and other files directly on the mounted device.
- Phone Disk runs unobtrusively in the background with little or no impact on your computers performance and can be run automatically on start-up.
- Phone Disk allows you to mount one or more iDevices in any combination and its features are accessible from the Mac OS X Finder Menu Bar.
- You can access the real root directory of Jailbroken iDevices.
- Its free until December 1st, 2010 — see below.
What’s Bad?
Phone Disk gives you an option labeled Change Connection Root that allows you to open a new disk mounting point linked to an iOS app’s folder. It will allow you to browse the contents of that folder, but the app would occasionally crash and close unexpectedly when accessing this feature. Immediately relaunching Phone Disk and trying this feature again resulted in it working properly the second time around.
If you don’t know your way around a computer very well you might want to stay away from Phone Disk, since there is a chance that you could manipulate the wrong file and cause yourself some unexpected problems. However, you should be able to recover by performing a restore from backup on your iDevice if that happens. Therefore, make sure that you perform a backup in iTunes before tinkering.
Conclusion
Phone Disk’s usefulness outweighs the quirky problem with the Change Connection Root feature. It is definitely worth having if you are curious about the information stored on your iDevice or you just need another tool that might help you support your iOS devices better than the average IT Ninja throwing star.
