Maintaining your Mac ?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Being new to Mac's, I have seen various people commenting on running Disk Warrior, Onyx, Utility Disk, etc. What do you run to maintain your Mac at it's optimum level? Apparently, some people do nothing and they think that's best.



I've run Onyx a couple of times and it seems to change some things and I'll just leave it at that. Are there programs that are worth the money?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    As a general rule, right before and after installing updates or new software, open Disk Utility and repair your hard drive's permissions.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    gebogebo Posts: 4member
    So you don't use any other software for OS X maintenance?
  • Reply 3 of 7
    regreg Posts: 832member
    Aside from repairing permissions, deleting cache and making backups of iPhoto, iTunes and some user folders, I don't do anything else. Of course I am not a big download person so there is less of chance of bad software slowing my system down.



    reg
  • Reply 4 of 7
    bergzbergz Posts: 1,045member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gebo

    So you don't use any other software for OS X maintenance?



    If it ain't broke...



    --B
  • Reply 5 of 7
    gebogebo Posts: 4member
    okay, I understand...
  • Reply 6 of 7
    areseearesee Posts: 776member
    Though it would be good to have Disk Warrior on hand in case your directory goes bad.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    OS X, like other UNIX and Linux systems tend to run maintenance scripts over night. These mostly just rotate log files to keep them at a reasonable size and to delete really old ones. However, if your system is not turned on overnight, then these tasks will be skipped and your log files will gradually get very big and slow your system down.



    A solution that I use is to install Anacron http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...v104tiger.html



    Anacron will make sure that the log rotations occur the next time you start your machine and every 60 minutes later to see if its missed any tasks. If there are no missed tasks, it will do nothing.



    Deleting your cache is probably not a good idea as a maintenance tool. After all, it is the point of the cache in the first place to store results that you might need again. Only clean out your cache if you're getting weird results with some programs (showing older results when it should be showing newer ones). Or if you need disk space real badly, then only clear out the cache.



    There are two camps to repairing permissions before and after installation. Some say it helps, others think it is a waste of time. I'm with the latter. Use it only if something is broken, otherwise don't bother.



    Finally, keep your HDD from getting too full. Leave about 10-20% empty to prevent fragmentation. Unless you create 10GB files regularly, your system will probably not fragment easily if there is always some empty space left over. This last tip applies not just to Macs, but to any OS. Systems with only a few hundred MB left will fragment and seriously degrade performance.



    Hope that helps!
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