weekly/monthly maintenance

[MidnightFlyer]

Would you mind listing the things you do in regards to routine maintenance on your computer? This is includes zapping the p-ram - and whatever else you can think of.

I want to print this out and put it by my Mac and try to keep up with this, week by week.

Again, please explain HOW to do the things you suggest. thanks a lot.

[vf124]

DiskWarrior 3.0
Drive10
MacJanitor

Every week, I run all the above utilities & optimize & backup

[where02190]

Daily: Rebuild desktop (hold down apple+option whenstarting up)
Backup twice at end of day, reomve one backup to offsite location.
Weekly: Zap PRAM (hold down apple+option+p+r when starting up until you hear startup chimes 3x), defrag (by reinializing) primary audio drives, dust case clean video monitor screen.
Monthly: Defrag (by reinializing) primary audio drives, restore system files. Clean dust from interior of computer.

[MidnightFlyer]

thanks Where. I knew you'd come through for me.

[CharlesL]

In addition to the questions on maintainence, can anyone tell me what is the benefits of repairing permissions on OS X boot partitions?

Is the Disk Utilitie's (OSX) First AID/Repair Disk useful if I do not have Disk Warrior or Norton? I've had bad experiences with Norton in OS9

For me, I regularly backup my boot drives (OS X) using Carbon Copy Cloner
And I have 2 external firewire drives on swappable docks (something like Where's "firedock") But mine are plastic bays also. Currently, I have 8 such bays with IDE harddisks inside. 2 are always inside the Firewire casings, and the other 6 are stored in a "dry box" (but in the same location as my studio)

A question for "Where". What do you do with the drives that are full? do u occasionally mount them to check if they work?

Regards,
[Charles]

[where02190]

If by full you mean the project if finished, either the client buys the drive or we reinitialize it and use it for another project. For liability reasons we do not store archived material, that is the respnosibility fo the client.

[CharlesL]

If by full you mean the project if finished, either the client buys the drive or we reinitialize it and use it for another project. For liability reasons we do not store archived material, that is the respnosibility fo the client.

Oh, so you don't keep a copy of the stuffs at all? Liabilities? Hmm, are you referring to music/song recording jobs? or Post Production works as well ? Yup. when i mention full, it means all 80Gb (my older backup drives) or 120Gb (recent ones are 120Gbs) are used up.

I do mainly for broadcast and only occasionally record / track songs. Most of my sessions are very big. If I include the final video file (DV), it is even bigger !!

Initially, I thought of keeping all jobs on separate external swappable bays. It's only recently that i realised I've got so many bays of HDD lying around, and I'm wondering what to do with them, and how to maintain/check them to make sure they are always in working conditions..

Backing up to CDRs or DVD-Rs (+R ??) takes relatively longer time than to just "Save Session As" or even just drag the whole session folder into the backup FW drives.

I think I need to work out a cheaper and more efficient solution.

Thanks and Regards,
[Charles]

[DesertDude]

In addition to the questions on maintainence, can anyone tell me what is the benefits of repairing permissions on OS X boot partitions?

OSX info

[where02190]

If the project is finished we no longer need to have it available, so no,m we do not keep a copy of it around. If we did that we'd have tens of thousands or dollars tied up in drives sitting doing nothing. Once the project is finished, it is handed to the client, unless as I said they do not wish to purchase the multitrack files, inwhich case they sing a waiver acknowledging so and the drive is wiped and used for another project.