My Mac Maintenance Strategy
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:
- I hose down the insides of my Mac Pro with a can of compressed air.
- I run Tianium Software’s Onyx to repair permissions, delete caches, and perform system maintenance on my hard drive.
- 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.
-Krishna
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Tell me what you think!
Mark Harmon
February 2, 2010 at 8:16 pmI’ve had my Mac mini for over 5 years. A couple months ago it would start to overheat and shut itself off. I thought that it was a sign that it was close to it’s death. Then, I cracked open the case and blew out all the dust. (There was A LOT!) After that, it’s been running like it was new. I did a clean “Nuke ‘n’ Pave” when I installed Leopard, so I hope it’s good for a while.
Another thing I do for maintenence is that I don’t put a lot of crap on it and I don’t try and make it do lots of stuff all the time. She’s my baby and I treat her with respect.
Finally, I sing to her every night and give it kisses.
Chris
February 2, 2010 at 8:33 pmThankfully my Mac runs and runs so much better than any PC I’ve ever used. About the only thing I do is maintain an Apple Time Machine backup on an external drive. Occasionally I restart my computer and empty out my trash. That’s it for me.
Matt
February 4, 2010 at 5:46 amNothing beats offsite storage; in conjunction with Time Machine and ChronoSync, I use CrashPlan. I had a whole bunch of data to upload the first time, so they shipped me a drive to save everything to, which was used to do the initial sync. Now everything is done over the wire. Couldn’t be happier.
Bob
February 4, 2010 at 11:07 amBlah, Blah, Blah.
I love my Mac.
Shut up FanBoys.
Krishna
February 4, 2010 at 6:29 pmSo….which Mac do you own, Bob? ;)