Mac Maintenance

[Celestial]

I have ProTools 7.0 LE on a PowerMac G5 OS 10. Though I prefer Mac to Windows, I'm used to working with windows.

Is there any maintenance that I can do to keep the computer working at optimum efficiency? I know in Windows there's "defragmenter" and so forth, is there anything similar that I should be doing with my Mac?

[Park Seward]

Mac does not need to be defraged.

You should rebuilt permissions after loading new software.

See Mac Janitor for info about automatically running maintance scripts.

And that is it on a normal basis. Others may have more tips.

Here are smoe more tips:

http://www.macworld.com/2005/01/feat...ters/index.php

[muzak13]

Park is on it.

Regular maintenance is:

Repair permissions before and after installing any software using Disk Utility.

Running the CRON scripts. These are maintenance routines written when UNIX (your OS - UNIX BSD to be specific) was running huge servers. There are daily, weekly and monthly CRON scripts. A good GUI for this is Cocktail - which costs $20 and has lifetime upgrades.

You can also run them with the Terminal app which is located in Applications-Utilities.

Open it and you will see a command line prompt. At the prompt type:

sudo periodic daily

Hit return

You will be asked for you administrative password - enter it and hit return again

The daily one runs very quickly - just a few seconds.

then:

sudo periodic weekly

You won't need to enter your password again

This one takes some time (maybe 2-3 minutes) - don't freak out - when it's done it will return you to the command prompt

then:

sudo periodic monthly

This one is in between the two in terms of how long it takes. When you are returned to the command prompt you are done.

A lot of Mac users freak out about command line computing and the sudo command. You would have to mistype these so badly they didn't resemble what I wrote here at all to do something nasty. And you would have to get very unlucky to type another command out of this that actually did something. I used to be a hard core DOS user and a C programmer so command line computing comes very natural to me.

But if you don't feel like experimenting with UNIX, I certainly can't blame you and the aformentioned utility apps work really well.

peace

[BRH]

I use Tech Tool Pro and I'm in the defrag camp. I've always defraged the system drive, and always will. It runs better.
System drive only, no media.
Others can do what they want.

[M.Brane]

Reading this will help you to understand more about the Mac's file system.

Repairing permissions, and defragging are not really as necessary as some think, but as long as your system is basically healthy won't do any harm other than waste your time.

An important one I learned recently is when doing any kind of OS update do not do anything else with the Mac while the update is in progress. This is an old OS9 habit of mine that I'm now glad I didn't abandon because it apparantly applies to OSX too. If I can find the link I'll pass it on, but I don't remember where it is at the moment.

Edit: ahh, here it is!

[Park Seward]

From Apple:

Do I need to optimize?

You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why:
Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. With more free space available, the file system doesn't need to fill up every "nook and cranny." Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.

Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."

Aggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor fragmentation has less effect on perceived system performance.

For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.

Note:Mac OS X systems use hundreds of thousands of small files, many of which are rarely accessed. Optimizing them can be a major effort for very little practical gain. There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the "hot band" for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668