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Repairing permissions. How often?

B

BitterB

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 22, 2007
57
0
Less than one year with Mac now. I've been using David Pogues "missing manual" to help learn within Tiger. Read about disk utility and repairing permissions, but never used it until last night. I got my iMac in June 2007.

Everything seemed to be running great until I bought and installed all the recent MacHeist applications. I also added an external in Dec, so maybe that might have screwed some stuff up too. Really, I have no clue and I'm learning on the fly.

I recently started experiencing some slow shutdowns and reboots, but I seemd to have fixed that by assigning my "startup disk" within preferences to Mac OS-X 10.11.11. For some reason nothing was selected.

Now that this has passed, I'm having iPhoto crash immediately upon opening. It happened a bunch of times, and I figured I'd give "disk utility" a shot. I verified disk and repaired permissions. iPhoto seems to work fine now, so it seems repairing persmissions might have fixed my problem. Does this sound right, or is it just coincidental?

My question is whether or not installing a bunch of applications, like MacHeist's, can monkey with persmissions?? Again, I don't understand why. I'm thankful Mac-OS X has a cool tool like this. How often should I fix disk permissions to keep things running smoothly?? Only when I do certain things?? Encounter problems?? Or running every month or whatever as a means of prevention??

Thanks to you Pros for helping me learn in this new world.
 
I repair permissions at least once a month. It does seem that 3rd party software is the cause of permissions problems. I don't understand why but repairing permissions does seem to solve my problems and that's what counts!
 
Repairing permissions seems to be the latest 'fix all' for Macs - like zapping PRAM and rebuilding the desktop used to be back in the pre-OS X days :)

Frankly, it's not necessary to do it that often. It's worthwhile after a system update, also worthwhile after installing anything that uses an installer (whether Apple's or a third party installer application) rather than just drag and drop. Otherwise it's only worth doing occasionally if things start acting a little hinky (and most of those times, it's not going to do much anyhow).
 
reboot necessary after fixing permissions?

Great. Thanks for the responses. It sounds like the 14 apps I installed from MacHeist might have been the cause of my issue. Question.....

Is a reboot required after verifying and fixing permissions?
 
tersono said:
Repairing permissions seems to be the latest 'fix all' for Macs - like zapping PRAM and rebuilding the desktop used to be back in the pre-OS X days :)

Frankly, it's not necessary to do it that often. It's worthwhile after a system update, also worthwhile after installing anything that uses an installer (whether Apple's or a third party installer application) rather than just drag and drop. Otherwise it's only worth doing occasionally if things start acting a little hinky (and most of those times, it's not going to do much anyhow).
Click to expand...

Yeah, I only repair permissions when things start to slow down or if I get strange messages.

BitterB said:
Great. Thanks for the responses. It sounds like the 14 apps I installed from MacHeist might have been the cause of my issue. Question.....

Is a reboot required after verifying and fixing permissions?
Click to expand...

No, a reboot is not required.

Cheers.
 
It sounds like the 14 apps I installed from MacHeist might have been the cause of my issue.

Yea I heard about some of those apps not working correctly.

Also try Onyx "Automation: followed by a reboot.

Does wonders.
 
I always repair after an update and after getting new 3rd party applications. I dont know what it does but its what you are supposed to do, so i just get on and do it :D.
 
I tend to do it before and after installing a software update or new application.
 
^Me either...

although I did so after reading this thread. I had installed probably over 30 apps... and upgraded the OS a few times...

So I guess it was time. I wanna say that my MB is running better, but I'm pretty sure it's all in my head loi..

whatever, I'll probably start doing this periodically now.
 
MacGuyver2 said:
whenever I Try to repair permissions it just gets stuck at like 20 percent and never moves..

see image
http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/2593/picture4yq8.jpg

-edit.. Nevermind.. it finished... just took ****ing forever and was stuck at 20% for like 5 minutes.
Click to expand...

Leopard's disk utility is miserably slow at repairing permissions; I usually get stuck at 5% for the first ten minutes. Hopefully 10.5.2 will fix this.
 
Just use something like Macaroni to run maintenance tasks and repair permissions automatically.
 
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