Comments on: Preventative Maintenance for Your Mac

By: David S.

David S. — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:08:17 +0000

Repair permissions is *hugely* overrated. You don’t need to run it every month, hardly ever in fact. See John Gruber’s article on the voodoo and superstition surrouding this function:

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/repair_permissions_voodoo

Help kill this pernicious myth instead of perpetuating it!

By: MarianneR

MarianneR — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:25:47 +0000

Hope this doesn’t sound stupid BUT…”Go to your Library, select Cache, and delete all the files you find there.” First of all there is more than one library. Secondly – I know (from PAST experience) that NOT all cache files should be deleted. I learned that the hard way! Can someone be more specific? Thanks!

By: Brandon Martinez

Brandon Martinez — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:06:54 +0000

Onyx all the way. I’ve been using it since I bought my first mac (a beautiful iMac) in January.

By: Shawn Blanc

Shawn Blanc — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:42:44 +0000

A lot of people think of them as being the same, but reparing permissions is different than disk defragmenter on Windows. A good read is John Greuber's article on the voodoo of repairing permissions.

By: Brent

Brent — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 13:39:36 +0000

Thanks Yohannes!

That’s what makes this site great… collaboration! I appreciate it.

By: Yohannes Wijaya

Yohannes Wijaya — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 08:39:04 +0000

i forgot to mention you can run #5 from the article above manually should you choose to in case you dont want to let your machine stays up at 2am. you can invoke the following command at terminal:

sudo periodic daily

you can substitute “daily” with “weekly” or “monthly” as well

I recommend superduper to perform backup, an excellent, worth-the-money app. or if you really want a good but free backup app, try the recently revamped carbon copy cloner.

By: Yohannes Wijaya

Yohannes Wijaya — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 08:33:17 +0000

i use onyx as well. mainmenu is also another interesting maintenatnce app i formerly used; it sits in your menubar waiting for your command and like onyx, it’s free

By: Brent

Brent — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:09:44 +0000

Never heard of it, till now! Thanks Derek. And for those of us who like links: Onyx 1.7.8 on VersionTracker

By: Derek Punsalan

Derek Punsalan — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:43:04 +0000

Tedious work trying to make sure that your Mac stays in tip top shape. Personally, I open Onyx and let it run all the maintenance scripts necessary on a semi-regular basis – about every two weeks.