Ask TUAW: how do you maintain your Mac?

I work at a Mac Repair shop. Please for the love of all that's holy BACK UP your data. You don't have to be crazy about it. Just say to yourself, if my computer was stolen tomorrow what would I miss? Then back-up accordingly. Personally I do a weekly back-up of my personal data to iDisk, a montly complete back-up using .Mac's back-up software to external hard drive and every six months I burn DVDs of anything irreplaceable and keep them at work.

sudo diskutil repairPermissions / sudo update_prebinding -root / fink -y selfupdate fink -y update-all fink -y scanpackages fink -y index fink -y cleanup apt-get -y update apt-get -y install fink apt-get -y upgrade apt-get -y dist-upgrade apt-get -y clean apt-get -y autoclean apt-get -y check

..... Maintenance? What is this 'maintenance' you speak of? ;) ... Seriously, I've not many software or hardware failures, in my ten- plus years of Macs. Sure, I've had a futzy OS now and again (maybe twice, including my last week's debacle), but a simple reinstall of the OS always does things right. Yes, it seems like lots of time; but honestly, to reinstall the OS and applications, rather than running myriad maintenance utilities that may or may not be fixing things seems (to me) to take the same amount of time. I keep my data in one folder. Some apps, like Studiometry, litter things in ~/Library/Application Support (sigh), so hell just back that up too. I just run a simple DejaVu daily backup onto an external drive, and voilᗢackup saved. I burn a few archive DVDs every month or so to clear off space. Backups are better than anything. This is more important than playing mechanic with your Mac. Really.

i use Maintenance 3.1

For my home system, Applejack about once a week. Backup via Retrospect Express to external Firewire drive once a week. I have multiple repair tools: TechTool Pro 4 (don't use too much, takes much longer and at times seems flakey); DiskWarrior 3 (love this one, my usual 1st to go to); Norton SystemWorks 3 (still reliable for me, I have no OS newer than 10.3.9 at the moment). Finally, just bought Drive Genius last week to prepare for future upgrades to OS 10.4 and beyond since Symantec has stopped developing repair utils for Mac. Initial uses of Drive Genius... I think I'm going to really like this one. With its repair and defrag features like Norton's and its rebuild features like DiskWarrior, it may quickly become my 1st line of repair defense. I'm not dropping the others though, I still expect they may repair some things that Drive Genius won't. I don't expect the average user to have an arsenal like this, but when you work for a Mac based business and are responsible to keep the Macs running, you don't trust your job to a single utility since no single one works on all problems. The more tools I have, the more likely I can fix the problem, which keeps the non-tech bosses feeling like I'm amazing and worth the money, always a nice side-effect.

I don't run any maintenance app. I try and keep important data in a few places (different drives), repair the permissions fairly often and do a clean install ever 10.x, that's about it. The machine is very stable, never lost data in the 4 years I've had it (obviously except for human error ;o)

OnyX - once a week or so to reset permissions and clear out cache's and hidden files. I'm also going to be adding an external firewire hd to back up my powerbook and my wife's ibook.

mantainance? i barely run discdoctor, and make no backups... my computer has crashed about 10 times in 2,5 years, and i'm running maya with 256MB RAM... that's why I love my G4 :D

Open Disk Utility and repair permissions once in a while (especially if i've recently installed a few apps or played around with anything system related). Once a week I open MacJanitor and run the weekly task. I've been doing that since 10.1. I also clean my powerbook with wet wipes every few weeks to keep it looking spiffy :-p

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13416 YASU Once a week, Verify/Repair Permissions as needed, but usually every two weeks. Plus constant cache empting of Safari (which I recently switched back to from Firfox) Also back up of everything on external drive. Am I over worried?