mac maintenance tips

[chardson]

Hey Chaps,

Recently decided to come back to the forums (had a different account, which I want to remove, but I didn't frequent or properly set up subscription emails). Anyway, I'm new to Mac maintenance. I've had this trusty laptop of mine for about 9 months now, and sometimes it feels like she's preggers (seriously, but if I went into details, this would get awkward)

Anyways, I need to do some good old fashioned maintenance like back in my PC days because:

1. the machine drags sometimes
2. I lost part of my music collection (not sure why, could've been my fault - no big deal, backed up)
3. the 60gig mac partition has ~7gigs free, ~8 on the 32gig windows one
4. a person should know how to do this sort of thing well

I found some pointers on http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html, which covered a bit for:

1. Repair Disk Permissions
2. Run Routine Maintenance Scripts
3. Clear Caches
4. Repair And Back Up Preferences
5. Do A File System Check And Repair Disk
6. Defragment A Hard Drive That Is Low On Free Contiguous Space
7. Check S.M.A.R.T. Status
8. Clear Your Desktop
9. Reset Safari
10. Rebuild Spotlight's Database

Honestly, it seems a pretty good list. I still have to do 5 and 6 (after I get an external drive for backup)


So, all that said, if you would be so kind as to pour out your wealth of knowledge, it could be a sturdy resource for me, and future such people. I have particular desire to know of spyware/virus scanners, specifically on the topic of recommendations and necessity. Also, if the macattorney guy supported anything that's totally useless, that would also be good information. I use OS X.4.10

Thanks kindly,
andrew///chardson

 

[chardson]

either I have scared you off already, or the list I mentioned was better than I thought!

andrew///chardson

 

[poopooegg]

I don't know if this will help out, but personally I use MainMenu. It does what you asked for in maintaining your mac system.

Take a look, hope you like it. http://www.santasw.com/

 

[Bacillus]

The best thing to do is to get Onyx, and run the scripts from that. OS X runs a daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts - but its like at 2AM on Saturdays or some odd time - and if your computer is off, its not run.

Long story short - get Onyx at the very minium, and run the maintenance scripts from that.

There are some pay disk utilities out there - if you want to spend the money.

For AV - its a waste of money to get Norton for most people. I use ClamXAV when I send out a file that originated on someone else's machine. True, we don't need to worry about viruses to the same degree as a PC user - but nothing says loser / noob more then being the source of an infected file.

http://www.clamxav.com/

 

[chardson]

MainMenu is a sturdy suggestion. It takes care of the scheduled scripts, as well as many other things. My system seems to be hanging much less since a day or two after I ran everything in MainMenu, so I'm betting that it deserves my thanks.

cheers mates, thanks for the suggestions
andrew///chardson

 

[zutme]

Computer maintenance in general seems like a waste of time to me. I've never seen it make a difference whatsoever, and applications that do maintenance on computers seem to cause more problems than they solve. I do believe in regular updates, but honestly what else could you possibly need to do?

 

[chardson]

I don't know, but it seemed like the maintenance I did when I ran windows, in that past life of a few years before, kept me from seeing the ever-feared BSoD. My machine's performance was halting and obnoxious a few weeks ago, when I decided to make this thread, and has been immensly better ever since.

andrew///chardson

 

[danman]

Defrag on a Mac isn't needed and in all likelyhood will slow down your Mac even more.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Defrag on a Mac isn't needed and in all likelyhood will slow down your Mac even more.

Wow, that's like, the worst piece of advice I've ever seen related to computers at all. Macs use a file system on a hard drive and yes they do need defragging on occasion and yes it will improve performance. How anyone could think otherwise is simply beyond me. No file system is 100% free from fragmentation - none of them and they never will be; it's impossible to ensure absolutely no fragmentation ever.

The best tip I'll offer for Mac owners (and yes I've owned several in the recent past, had hardware issues with every single one of them and returned them all) is this:

Don't let your partitions ever get past 85% full - HFS+ has issues when the drives/partitions are that full, and in loading a drive/partition so fully you can corrupt the entire file system to the point that a repair or even a data recovery job will be nearly impossible. I've seen it happen in the Macs I've serviced, read about it in tech bulletins, seen Apple put out documentation that says the same thing, seen utility software like TechTool Pro and others offer the same tip in their maintenance tips sections.

Full hard drives are bad, m'kay?

 

[chardson]

Wow, I really don't know how to reply to the "don't defrag" comment, except by mentioning a Gateway machine (years ago, before I knew what I was doing) once died when I left it on to defrag all day. Why, I never found out.

Defragging directly leading to an increase in performance is sensible because data is spread all across a disk, and the retrieval times increase as the hardware involved has to traverse further across the physical medium. I am no expert on data storage or the software involved, but I do not understand how danman's claim could make any sense at all.

 

[zutme]

What danman said isn't all that ridiculous. The HFS+ file system is very resistant to fragmentation, and if there were some unforeseen event which occurred in the middle of a defrag (e.g. a power failure) it could do more damage than it did good. Ask anyone using a unix-like operating system especially Linux or BSD how often they defrag, and I guarantee most will say never. This is because we aren't using FAT32 and this isn't 1998.

As for the other comments you made earlier about maintenance improving speed, if it makes you feel like your system is faster have fun with that, but all that stuff is mainly snake oil in my book.

 

[blankwire]

What danman said isn't all that ridiculous. The HFS+ file system is very resistant to fragmentation, and if there were some unforeseen event which occurred in the middle of a defrag (e.g. a power failure) it could do more damage than it did good. Ask anyone using a unix-like operating system especially Linux or BSD how often they defrag, and I guarantee most will say never. This is because we aren't using FAT32 and this isn't 1998.

As for the other comments you made earlier about maintenance improving speed, if it makes you feel like your system is faster have fun with that, but all that stuff is mainly snake oil in my book.

QFT, but there is a lot of truth to what bbz_Ghost said about hard drive space.

 

[hungryduck]

somewhere online someone did a tests running programs before defragging and after defragging.....defrag on their mac actually slowed some things down....
ill try and find the article

 

[blankwire]

somewhere online someone did a tests running programs before defragging and after defragging.....defrag on their mac actually slowed some things down....
ill try and find the article

If you're talking about the same article (which was a forum post, by the way) he actually never completed the defrag and probably left his hard drive is worse condition.

That much was user error, so it's moot.

 

[CreativeMac]

Wow, that's like, the worst piece of advice I've ever seen related to computers at all. Macs use a file system on a hard drive and yes they do need defragging on occasion and yes it will improve performance. How anyone could think otherwise is simply beyond me. No file system is 100% free from fragmentation - none of them and they never will be; it's impossible to ensure absolutely no fragmentation ever.

The best tip I'll offer for Mac owners (and yes I've owned several in the recent past, had hardware issues with every single one of them and returned them all) is this:

Don't let your partitions ever get past 85% full - HFS+ has issues when the drives/partitions are that full, and in loading a drive/partition so fully you can corrupt the entire file system to the point that a repair or even a data recovery job will be nearly impossible. I've seen it happen in the Macs I've serviced, read about it in tech bulletins, seen Apple put out documentation that says the same thing, seen utility software like TechTool Pro and others offer the same tip in their maintenance tips sections.

Full hard drives are bad, m'kay?

Defragging. . .will it help? Probably. Will it help and improve speed enough to justify the time investment? Usually not. In 7 years of full time Mac support, it's been extremely rare where a fragmented drive was the problem. Normally, it's directory corruption or overlapped files, or damaged system resources. 95% of the time, Disk Warrior takes care of it. But my feelings toward defragging are radically different for OS9 volumes vs. OSX volumes. Back in the OS9 days, there weren't that many files or directories and in most cases defragmenting a drive only took 10-15 minutes. OS9 wasn't terribly smart in where it put things, so you'd often see a decent speed bump. The system would just feel more snappy and responsive. OSX has infinitely more files and direcories than does OS9.x. As a result there's more to shuffle around. Further, OSX was always smarter about where it put things on a volume - and even more so with the introduction of journaling. Defragging an OSX volume commonly takes a few hours, and in my experience there's little tangible benefit. Certainly not enough to justify the amount of time invested.

Your other point about HD space is a good one, and is too often ignored. It wasn't much of an issue in the OS9 days because if you used virtual memory, it grabbed what it needed and so long as you had enough space to give VM what it wanted the system performed just fine. OSX doen't work that way. It dynamically allocates memory and swap space. When it runs out of swap space (on a hard drive), the system can bog noticably. Getting clients to understand this is often a challenge.

Computer maintenance in general seems like a waste of time to me. I've never seen it make a difference whatsoever, and applications that do maintenance on computers seem to cause more problems than they solve. I do believe in regular updates, but honestly what else could you possibly need to do?

I see two points in what you said - one about regular maintenance and the other about maintenance/repair utilities. Maintenance does indeed help, though for most people they can wait until there's a problem before really doing anything. Repairing permissions and running all the cron scripts (which can be done by restarting your machine once in a while) are often a big help. Now whether you need to do preventative maintenance will depend. . .the less you can afford to be without your machine, the more important preventative maintenance is. As for the utilities. . .virtually any utility application can potentially screw up a machine to varying degrees if used improperly. This is why I really hesitate to leave applications such as BatchMod on client's machines. In the disclaimers for applications such as Onyx and Cocktail, they essentially tell you to make sure you know what you're doing. In this regard, the best utility application I've seen is DiskWarrior. It doesn't do everything, but what it does (directory repair and a couple other things) it does really really well and doesn't screw anything up.

 

[0ptional]

Well, it's good to note that sometimes boot camp assistant cant move files when creating a new partition; and if that happens, a good full defrag will free up the end of the disc and allow for boot camp assistant to be able to do it's job.

Of course it'd be faster to just... backup to an external, then boot from that, then restore to the internal; which would put all your data at the beginning of the disc anyway...

 

[vraa]

Wow, that's like, the worst piece of advice I've ever seen related to computers at all. Macs use a file system on a hard drive and yes they do need defragging on occasion and yes it will improve performance. How anyone could think otherwise is simply beyond me. No file system is 100% free from fragmentation - none of them and they never will be; it's impossible to ensure absolutely no fragmentation ever.

The best tip I'll offer for Mac owners (and yes I've owned several in the recent past, had hardware issues with every single one of them and returned them all) is this:

Don't let your partitions ever get past 85% full - HFS+ has issues when the drives/partitions are that full, and in loading a drive/partition so fully you can corrupt the entire file system to the point that a repair or even a data recovery job will be nearly impossible. I've seen it happen in the Macs I've serviced, read about it in tech bulletins, seen Apple put out documentation that says the same thing, seen utility software like TechTool Pro and others offer the same tip in their maintenance tips sections.

Full hard drives are bad, m'kay?

I wonder if there is way to mod this FUD and BULLSHIT.

HFS+ deals very well with defragmentation, and it's okay to have a full hdd, just make sure it's not too long (duh).

Just run Yasu every few months. Easy as pie.

 

[BBA]

A little different question here, not a big Mac person but have a specific need: I need to schedule a job on OSX to delete the contents of two folders, once a week. Currently I have been using terminal rm -rf on the folders manually.

Would appreciate if anyone can advise me on an easy way to do this. I'm thinking cron, but have never set up cron to do anything.

I looked at some of the apps linked to in the above posts and they all seem to be general 'keep your blah blah blah maintenance crap up...but none seem to be simple like open a task scheduler, put a command in, credentials, time to run and go.

 

[mope54]

yes, just use cron (you could use an apple script but it wouldn't be necessary for that simple of a task)

as for the posted list, the only thing that might possibly help would be 5 and 7. I supposed a case could be made for 9.

1 has reached such mythical status that it's finally been removed from the El Capitan Disk Utility GUI.
(and it doesn't "fix" anything, but merely resets permissions to default).

 

[StryderxX]

Defragging is not needed with solid state storage. It will actually harm an SSD since it reduces write cycles. Just verify that TRIM is enabled since it takes care of garbage collection.

 

[westrock2000]

crontab is doable. I have it set up. For me I can write a shell script very fast, where as I am not familiar with XML as well. You have to create a file in your home directory in order to get crontab working, but after that it's fine.

under your home directory (user directory) create a file called ".crontab"

cd ~
touch .crontab
chmod u+rwx .crontab

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Way to resurrect an 8-year-old thread with an off-topic question.

You should be using launchd, not cron.

There may also be a way to do this via AppleScript/Automator.

1 has reached such mythical status that it's finally been removed from the El Capitan Disk Utility GUI.
(and it doesn't "fix" anything, but merely resets permissions to default).

There is/was actually more to it than that (the option can be invoked from the CLI.). Now, Apple says:

System file permissions are automatically protected, and updated during Software Updates. The Repair Permissions function is no longer necessary.

 

[mope54]

Way to resurrect an 8-year-old thread with an off-topic question.

You should be using launchd, not cron.

There may also be a way to do this via AppleScript/Automator.



There is/was actually more to it than that (the option can be invoked from the CLI.). Now, Apple says:

That link merely supports what I wrote and doesn't say anything more than what I wrote. In any case, my point stands--it's not a routine maintenance feature

Also, while cron has been deprecated for launchd many of us still prefer cron over launchd and recommend it for something as simple as this...especially if one uses cron jobs in more than one environment