I’ve owned and used Macs since 1996. The ones I’ve owned have been generally trouble-free and given me a lot of good service. As they say, “treat your tools with care, and they will treat you well.” (I’m not exactly sure who said that, but it sounded good, so go with it.)

For the most part, there isn’t much in the way of my routine Mac maintenance. Here’s what I do on a monthly basis:

1. I hose down the insides of my Mac Pro with a can of compressed air.
2. I run Tianium Software’s Onyx to repair permissions, delete caches, and perform system maintenance on my hard drive.
3. I run Alsoft’s Disk Warrior to rebuild directories on my main hard drive. (Worth the $99 if you ask me.)

Every 6 months or so, I run Coriolis’s iDefrag. (costs $30)

Instead of booting up the DiskWarrior CD, I run it from another internal hard drive on my system. The advantage of doing this is DW runs much, much faster.

Whenever I’m prepared to install a new Mac OS, I prefer to back-up my data and wipe my main boot drive. It gets rid of any cruft (unused apps, old preferences, etc.) and generally (I find) makes my system more responsive. Yes, it’s a minor pain in the backside to reinstall all my apps, but I’ve gotten used to it.

My back-up strategy is limited to the external drives I have in my office. I’m looking into backing up my data to the “cloud”, but so far, I’m not sure which service is best for me. I incorporate two different types of data back-ups. One type is via Apple’s own Time Machine. The other is through Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper. Time Machine backs-up on the hour, every hour, and I have SuperDuper scheduled for a full data back-up every night. The advantage of using SuperDuper is that it creates a fully bootable back-up drive.

If you’re running a Mac, I’m curious to know what your Mac maintenance strategy is. Sound off in the comments below.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

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