Drive Maintenance

[310_2_Yuma]

Just looking at apps for drive maintenance...is there one that clashes with PT 7.3.1 cs? Is there one that works exceptionally well? I was looking at Drive Genius, but can't see that it has a defragmenting feature. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks

Powerbook G4 1.67 ghz, 80G/1Gig Ram/160GB LaCie FW drive

[kindkind]

evry1 seems to like disk warrior

[muzak13]

No defragging is necessary in OSX.

Disk Warrior is great when your disk is in trouble but other than that just run your regular maintenance routines - repair permissions, CRON scripts, clean caches.

I always use fsck -fy first if there's a sign of disk trouble - then I might go to Disk Warrior.

peace

[310_2_Yuma]

No defragging is necessary in OSX.

Disk Warrior is great when your disk is in trouble but other than that just run your regular maintenance routines - repair permissions, CRON scripts, clean caches.

I always use fsck -fy first if there's a sign of disk trouble - then I might go to Disk Warrior.

peace

Ok, thanks. Um.. fsck-fy. CRON. I am not compu-quick enough to know the acronyms....

[Park Seward]

Do a search for "Cocktail" or "Macjanitor".

[mindnoise]

HI,

the best safest and fastest way to "defrag" is backing up, deleting, copy back. Use
Carbon Copy Cloner for this to clone ANY disk partion. It`s a GUI to the OS X built in
"ditto" backup programm.
CCC will eventually become obsolete when OSX 10.5 introduces Timemachine.

and as the OLD and proved Unix saying goes: if a disk/partition is half full it`s full.


regs

[muzak13]

Ok, thanks. Um.. fsck-fy. CRON. I am not compu-quick enough to know the acronyms....

CRON scripts were written when this operating system (UNIX BSD) was running huge servers. They are cleanup routines. There is a daily, weekly, and monthly CRON script that should be run. They were engineered to run in the middle of the night since servers never shut down. They are still necessary to keep your computer healthy but they won't run if your computer is off or sleeping.

The utilities Park mentioned can run them for you. You can also run them from the Terminal application:

Open Terminal - you will see a command prompt -type

sudo periodic daily
Hit Return
You will be asked for your administrative password - enter it
Hit Retun

The daily CRON script takes a matter of seconds to run

You will be returned to the command prompt - type

sudo periodic weekly
Hit Return
You won't be asked for your password this time - you are already logged in as an administrator
This one will take a while to run - maybe 2 or 3 minutes

When it is done you will be returned to the command prompt again - type

sudo periodic monthly
Hit Return
This one runs very fast
When the command prompt reappears quit Terminal

That's it. You have run your CRON scripts. If you do this and repair your permissions before you install software and after you install software that is all the regular maintenance your computer should need.

fsck -fy and Disk Warrior are for when your hard disk is sick. Which on a Mac isn't very often in my experience, although I have had to use them both.

peace

[infamous plague]

what exactly does CRON clean up?

[Park Seward]

Cron is simply a schedule.

From the Apple web site:

Mac OS X performs background maintenance tasks at certain times if the computer is not in sleep mode. If your computer is shut down or in sleep at the designated times, the maintenance does not occur. In that case, you may want or need to run these manually.

Mac OS X periodically runs background tasks that, in part, remove system files that are no longer needed. This includes purging older information from log files or deleting certain temporary items. These tasks do not run if the computer is shut down or in sleep mode. If the tasks do not run, it is possible that certain log files (such as system.log) may become very large.

These tasks are scheduled for 03:15 to 05:30 in your computer's local time zone. This is described further in "Mac OS X: Unexplained Disk Activity Produced by "find" Process".

If your computer is normally shut down at night, you may choose to force the process to start manually.

How to force maintenance tasks

You have two options: Use a third-party application or Terminal.

Use a third-party application
Some third-party applications may allow you to run these tasks whenever you wish. Four examples include:

Macaroni by Thomas Harrington
Mac Janitor by Brian R. Hill
CronMaster by Dan Klein
weRclean by Parental Advisory
You can search for these or other solutions at VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/).

Also, check this out: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...intenance.html

[infamous plague]

thanks park. I generally leave my compuuter on 24/7, so these processes run daily?