Filed under: Features, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW
Ask TUAW: how do you maintain your Mac?
Last Friday a reader wanted to know how the TUAW community keeps their Macs and their displays clean. This week I figured I'd post a reader's question about maintaining a Mac under the hood. I lost the reader's email, so I apologize to whoever sent in the question, but here we go with this week's Ask TUAW: how do you maintain OS X? What cleanup apps do you run? Do you check your permissions once a month or is DiskWarrior a daily habit? Do you backup, wipe and reinstall OS X often or have you been upgrading through every version since 10.0? Personally, since I'm on Tiger I've settled into using the Maintenance 3.0 Automator action. I've tied it to start up on a weekly repeating appointment in iCal, so I never forget to run it.
But what about you, dear TUAW readers? How do you keep your Mac humming along?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Dave Schultz said 6:06PM on 10-28-2005
DiskWarrior and Applejack once a month (or if things get flaky); daily backups, alternating among two hard drives, with a third in rotation to be stored offsite.
I also store critical data files encrypted on a gmail account using GeeDisk.
OS X never gives me much grief, esp. compared to System 9.x.
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Henry said 6:11PM on 10-28-2005
I don't really do any matainence unless there is a problem, but I do keep a backup of my HD on an external firewire drive.
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consumer_q said 6:20PM on 10-28-2005
Not so much is done with my Macs, but things seem to run smoothely:
- Let the cron jobs run automotacially, but sometimes run them myself via terminal.
- Manually empty caches.
- Run Disk Warrior when things seem odd or are sluggish
&
- for every 10.x update, I do a clean install.
The last one is my favourite because I do not just archive everything and re-install, but install all the applications from scratch. Although this can take a day or two, the benefits to me are that I:
- am reminded of stuff I may not have used in a while
- do not install things I will likely not use again
- end up downloading all the updates for my applications, some of which I have forgotten to do previously
My HDD automagically gets more HDD space, and things stay less cluttered...for a whle.
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Conor Hastings said 6:21PM on 10-28-2005
I dont do anything but back up some important files to my iPod
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Brad said 6:29PM on 10-28-2005
I don't usually do anything for my computer, but when something happens, I backup everything that I know I'll need.
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Ben said 6:28PM on 10-28-2005
a. Disk Utility: I run Disk Utility> Verify/Fix permissions every other week.
b. Tech Tool: 1x or 2x a month. This allows me to defrag + scan my HD for errors.
c. SMARTReporter: I Always have SMARTReporter running on my toolbar, it lets me know if my HD is going to be wonky.
d. OmniDisksweeper: I use this to delete any dangling files (preference/cache/etc.) that an uninstaller may have left behind.
e. Cocktail: Once in a while I'll run this.. Honestly don't know too much about what it does but it has a cool icon and people say that it's good.
f. I don't currently have a backup solution yet, but I just ordered an ext. DVD burner to archive my stuff.. I'll probably use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup.
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AH said 7:50PM on 10-28-2005
I happen to like Cocktail. I have it set up to run my cron jobs automatically, delete the cache, repair permissions, etc...
I like the all in one centralizied interface for the minimal amount of maintenance my Macs need.
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Joe Eversole said 8:10PM on 10-28-2005
I test drove Maintenance for a bit, and it has done something extremely strange to my Terminal.app. Every time I launch a Terminal window, it tries to run the script. Nevermind the fact that I deleted the application months ago.
I've been in contact with the author, and he said he's working with Apple engineering to try to find out what the problem is, but, there's apparently two of us now that have this issue. I'm half tempted to reformat over this. It's making it impossible to run Keychain (the *IX SSH key manager) because of weirdness in Terminal.
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cameron aka desk003 said 8:12PM on 10-28-2005
I run MacJanitor every once and awhile, and about once a week I run CarbonCopyCloner and backup to a external Firewire drive.
Before CCC copies everything it repairs perms, so that happens about once a week.
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Zach Everson said 9:32PM on 10-28-2005
Weekly - run Cocktail and Backup to my iDisk.
Monthly - run DiskWarrior.
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Matt said 9:52PM on 10-28-2005
Maintenance?
I backup my important files every so often to my file server. Other than that, I usually just rely on cron jobs and such. Heck, I had 8 week uptime on my iBook until I bumped the battery earlier tonight and it was running like a charm.
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greenline said 11:28PM on 10-28-2005
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?
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Oliver said 3:33AM on 10-29-2005
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
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kai said 7:05AM on 10-29-2005
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
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Weave said 11:23AM on 10-29-2005
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.
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xSmurf said 11:48AM on 10-29-2005
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)
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Roy Behymer said 12:12PM on 10-29-2005
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.
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BlackPearl said 4:16PM on 10-29-2005
i use Maintenance 3.1
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iomatic said 7:48PM on 10-29-2005
.....
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 voil?ackup 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.
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J McFarren said 7:16PM on 10-29-2005
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
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