Yep. Maintenance. Just like your car, a Mac needs to have “stuff” done to it from time to time, to keep running normally and to prevent slow performance and the dreaded SPOD (spinning pizza-wheel of death).
CAUTION: Unless specifically noted, the links to applications will be for Snow Leopard versions. Contact the developer for earlier versions.
When do I need to do maintenance?
I recommend that at the very least, you repair permissions once a year. If strange symptoms appear, you can repair perms as a troubleshooting procedure, but it should be done at least annually. Not everyone agrees, but Apple recommends it, and they know more about their stuff than the rest of us. It can’t hurt.
In addition, I’d clear caches and rebuild the directory at least annually. In an intensive business situation, I’d do it every 6 months. Video production, music production, graphic arts businesses in particular will benefit from more frequent maintenance.
How do I maintain my Mac?
You can always call me, of course. Or another good consultant. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, and you aren’t losing money by spending time on your Mac more profitably spent on your business, and you’re willing to spend some money on utilities, you can use Onyx (freeware) or Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner (or the Leopard, Tiger and Panther versions found here) for clearing caches. Disk Warrior is the standard tool for rebuilding directories. That’s all it does, but it does it so well!
WARNING! BACK UP PRIOR TO DOING MAINTENANCE TASKS!
I thought Mac OS did it’s own maintenance!
It does, sort of. There are daily, weekly and monthly tasks built into the OS that do a lot of the maintenance work. When they work. Up until Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) there was a bug in the system that caused a problem. The tasks are scheduled for 3 am, but if the Mac is not on and awake, it is supposed to run the tasks at the next available opportunity. The bug prevented that, so unless your Mac was awake, they didn’t get done in Panther and Tiger.
Fortunately there’s a lovely little freeware utility called Anacron that fixes the problem. It’s available in Panther and Tiger flavors, and once installed is completely invisible.
What’s the Directory, and how do I rebuild it?
Think of the directory as the road map the processor uses to tell the hard drive where to look for the bits and bytes that make up the applications and files we use. That’s a vast over-simplification, but it’ll give you an idea of what it is.
Please, don’t comment with long descriptions of what it really means… very few of us care. This post is for those who just want their Mac to work. If you want more detailed info, contact me directly.
There is, in my opinion, only one tool to rebuild the directory. Disk Warrior is a one-trick pony. It only does one thing, but it does it very well indeed. It needs to be installed on a different drive from the one you are rebuilding, so unless you have a bootable external drive or are willing to purchase one, don’t bother with this one. It’s cheaper to have me do it.
My Mac is REAL SLOOOOOOW
More often than not when I hear this from a client it’s one of two things. Either their hard drive is more than 80% full (usually more like 90%) or their drive is heavily fragmented.
Mac OS X uses virtual memory extensively, unless you have 10+ GB of RAM (and even then!). The reason you can have lots of files and apps open at the same time is that when the all the available memory is used, the system can write to the hard drive, instead of memory modules. This is slower than writing to the memory modules, but works pretty well. When there is very little space left on the drive, or if the free space is in little chunks, none very large and scattered all over the drive, the virtual memory process gets very slow indeed.
Recommendations generally are for at least 15-20% free space on your drive. There is an argument that the larger drives today don’t need so much, that 50 GB is more than enough. My experience tells me to go with the recommendation. Drives are not expensive, but lack of productivity is. If you have less than 10% free space, the answer is to get a bigger drive, or if you have enough free space but it’s fragmented badly, to defrag the drive.
I thought OS X took care of fragmentation
The Mac OS is great at taking care of file fragmentation, or at least making it a small issue. It does nothing for volume fragmentation.
File fragmentation comes when your hard drive is forced to write a big file in more that one piece, due to the lack of adequate free space. This doesn’t cause problems, usually, as the modern Mac operating system is able to keep track easily, and hard drives are fast enough to minimize the problem.
Volume fragmentation comes when the free space (where no active files are written, tho erased files may still reside there) becomes so fragmented that productivity slows down. This can only be
Danger, Will Robinson!
Mucking about with your hard drive is dangerous to your files! Back up BEFORE you do any heavy maintenance, and especially before defragmenting your drive.
Defragging
The only software I am comfortable with to defrag is called iDefrag (Coriolis Systems, $29.95). It works. It’s scary, if you understand what it does, but it works.
The alternative is to clone to an erased external drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper (my personal preference), both free (Super Duper is $27.95, but the demo is free. Limited features, but it works for this purpose).
Is that it?
Pretty much. Anything else falls under the heading of troubleshooting, which is another kettle of gigabytes.
By the way, before you ask, Tech Tool Pro is a wonderful application that I use for a number of things, but for defragging, and especially for rebuilding the directory, I prefer the apps listed above. Your mileage may vary. Hope this helps…
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