regular maintenance

[joeyjojoe]

okay so i've heard from a lot of people that i need to repair disk permissions pretty often. is there anything else i need to do to keep my machine running well?

i'm totally new to macs and osx, so please speel it out for me.

 

[simX]

I disagree with the statement that repairing permissions should be done regularly. Repairing permissions need only be used as a troubleshooting step, although it is one of the more important troubleshooting steps, as permissions can cause some very big problems.

As for your actual question -- I don't believe there's anything that really is vital to regularly do in order to keep your machine up and running well. Mine has been up and running fine without repairing permissions or doing anything else that often.

 

[wdlove]

I don't even know or understand the repair disk permissions. What about the use of Drive 10, Tech Tools Pro, Norton Utilities, or Disk Warrior. Such as just the routine tests or defragmentation?

 

[idea_hamster]

It's my understanding that disk utilities like Disk 10 are really best for fixing disk problems, so they're good to have on hand in case of problems, but don't really do much in the way of maintenance.

Also, defragmenting is unlikely to give a big performance boost since OS X is unix-based. Unix systems are designed to quickly use information located on different computers, so some fragmentation isn't likely to slow it too much.

I repair permissions about once a month -- I think it helps to keep things running well and avoid problems. Some folks say it's not necessary. I think it doesn't hurt and seems to help.

 

[rainman::|:|]

it doesn't hurt to repair permissions, sometimes something could be going wrong that you know nothing about, and it will correct it. same for defragging, it's not really necessary but can't hurt. i defrag every 6 months or so... force of habit, i guess.

the biggest thing i think is letting the computer be on and awake at night, i let the screen go to sleep but the computer stays on... your computer does nightly, weekly, and monthly maintenance routines if it's awake at like 2AM. There are ways to run these routines otherwise, like MacJanitor, but if you just leave it on at night, it takes care of itself.

pnw

 

[crap freakboy]

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/care_feeding_jag.html

 

[joeyjojoe]

thanks folks, i didn't know os x does auto maintenance. what if i'm doing something at that time? will it delay until it sees there is nothing running or is it just set to do the work at 2 am?

 

[mmmdreg]

It just runs in the background. From memory, I think the its in the vicinity of 3.15. I'll check that when I'm back at the Mac. Anyway, it doesn't matter what you're doing. The daily and monthly scripts are pretty quick to finish. The weekly takes a bit longer. You can see that by running them manually in terminal by
"sudo sh /etc/daily"
"sudo sh /etc/weekly" and same for monthly. Well that's from memory again.

 

[Bear]

The only time I have had permissions be wrong is after installing software or software updates.

So if you are not installing stuff, you shouldn't need to repair permissions. I tend to do a permissions repair after software updates. This is a lot easier than waiting until something goes wrong or the once a month deal.