Macintosh maintainence: the missing manual

The Coffee Shop
1

Can anyone tell me about de-fraging or optimizing hard drives on a mac?

I haven’t used Norton’s in years, and would rather not have to. Up to now I copy everything over to another hard drive, do a deep erase, and either copy or re-install everything back.

Any other ideas?

2

How big is your disk, how full is it, and what version of Mac OS are you running? Unless you are editing multi-GB digital video files, have a very nearly full disk, and are running an old OS, I’m not sure you’d see much (if any) of a measurable benefit from doing so. Optimization and defragmentation aren’t the same thing. Under Mac OS X, it’s possible for many files to be fragmented without any noticeable loss of performance since most files aren’t accessed very often. Apple has a pretty good article on this topic - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US

3

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

If you want to defrag.

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html

Cleans up logs etc.

4

Thanks for the info.

My drive has plenty of space, and I’m running 10.4.11. I keep my OS and all software on a separate internal drive. I’ve been a mac owner since 1993 and never had a problem (except one time when I discovered that these stupid macs REQUIRE that you plug the cords into the actual computer!)

But this is the slow time of year for us, and it’s been a couple of years since I did any maintenance on this computer. It’s probably just piece of mind that makes me want to do this.

5

Thank you. Links are bookmarked.

6

There’s only one application you’ll ever need to “maintain” your Mac: Onyx.

It has clean-up scripts, maintenance jobs, etc. Very intuitive and easy to use, and you can schedule jobs to run as you wish.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

7

that sort of surprises me. Linux file systems (ext, Resiser, ect) don’t fragment like NTFS or FAT. Was that the only feature of linux that OSX didn’t adopt?

8

you don’t need to defrag unix, it writes smartly, and programs like drive genius will only have you reloading if you use them. I have a license if you want to buy it.

tiger cache cleaner or leopard cache cleaner is all you need. both are light weight and only run when you want them too.

Ben