With the assistance of a few free utility programs, routine maintenance under OS X is very easy. The very same procedures and utilities that are used for routine maintenance under OS X are what Randy B. Singer recommends for generic troubleshooting.
OS X Routine Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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He says to use MacJanitor for running the maintenance scripts if your computer is not on 24 hours a day…..
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
go to apple.com and search for “anacron” it works on a time interval system rather than a hard set time of day so your computer does not need to be on 24 hours a day for the scripts to run during the appropriate times.
how stupid are these journalists!!!
And why should you have to defragment your hard drive? I think HFS+ relocates files on the fly if certain conditions are fulfilled (system up for more than three minutes…).
Ah, that’s it: Cache, Swap and bla…
Well, that’s what a dedicated swap partition (regardless if in BSD or Linux/whatever lingo) is good for.
Mac OS uses multiple partitions anyway, they are not user-visible, but if you look at it in fdisk, there a often partition maps, driver partitions etc. wouldn’t there be enough space for a dedicated swap partition too, and does Darwin support this so you can do it yourself?
Have you ever used MacJanitor? Do you know what it does? It runs those same scripts /etc/periodic/{daily,weekly,monthly} It would be the same as opening a terminal window, and sudoing those scripts. It’s just a front end. Your suggestion of anacron is a useful one, but if you don’t want anacron, and would rather run the scripts yourself, MacJanitor is a fine option. Oh, and don’t overreact. That’s silly.
the “maintenance” tools and I habe never defragmented my harddisk an I didn’t have ANY problems with my OS X installtions (4 Macs) so far.
My opinion: These tools are not necessary.
Cocktail is another app that does many things in regards to maintenance.
“My opinion: These tools are not necessary.”
It depends on how you use your drive. If you work with large files a lot, defragging is a good idea. If you hack OS X a lot, repairing permissions is a good idea. If you don’t do either you don’t have much to worry about.
people what their systems to just work with out them having to think about it. AnaCron allows them to do that.
Riiiiight. So the fact that my machine wouldn’t boot the other day should just be ignored?
Repair file permissions from the boot disk (despite being advised against it by the author) resolved my boot issue. But then I had a few other issues. I ran MacJanitor (I think) And slow boot and crashing Safari went away. Ta da!
You’ve never had problems. If you refuse to learn how to fix them, then pray you never have them.
If you run Repair Permissions from the CD, you should do it from the harddrive too afterwards, as the permissions given on the harddrive is given by the actual receipts from the installers and not just the default ones that you get from the CD. That is why he doesn’t want you to do it from there. If you don’t have a choice, and it works, fine 🙂
Randy Singer has been doing a lot of good troubleshooting guides for ages, but Debman could not be more far off. Randy is not a journalist, he is an attorney at law. Can’t you even read the whole page before you reply? Debman go hide a few weeks, while you blush.
I personally have not installed Anacron, as I actually enjoy what the crontab is doing, and don’t want another bloat to do the same.
AnaCron Replaces Cron’s functions, it does not act while Cron Acts.
it is not bloat, it is a simple little command line utility built as an improved Cron, in fact there is a thing called an anacrontab
As far as I can see, anacron is started by the crontab every 15 minutes past the hour, so for me it is overhead that I do not need. You can hardly call it an improved cron, but perhaps an extension to cron
Again you really should read just a little bit about what you write before you expose your ignorance.
For a start you could learn a bit about what cron does and how anacron works before you claim that anacron replaces its functions. Anacron relies totally on cron and can never replace it, nor is it intended to.
However, I will grant you so much that it can be useful for those who like to have their crontab stuff done as soon as possible after they forgot to do it, for whatever reason.
Sorry to be rude, but when you start being totally rude to someone, you cannot expect to be treated nicely either, especially when you don’t even have your facts straight.
I still don’t want to install anacron, as it still is bloat for me.
telling you that it is not bloat is being rude?
No, calling the article’s author stupid [and the more for no reason] is.
Geez, talk about knowing before speaking!
Anacron in no way ‘replaces cron’ nor does it intend to.
Anacron, that’s true, last I checked, doesn’t rely on cron.
Given these last 2, I think the choice of name was most unfortunate.
… could that be because you have a script set up to run every 15 minutes? perhaps its just doing its job, running things at set intervals…
it appears the author did not read this article http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/ that concludes that defragmentation utilities are essentially unnecessary for HFS+ partitions. as someone above said, people dealing with large files (like video) in realtime applications might see some benefit, but i would not consider these average users, and i doubt a file fragment every 20MB or so probably won’t hurt them anyway.
i know he’s a lawyer and not a tech guy, but a lot of his comments seem to come from speculation (macs need a lot of contiguous space to run well) and not data driven conclusions. it seems those are steps that make him feel better about using his mac and may or may not have any bearing on reality, or at least that’s what his lack of empirical information leads me to believe.
He has committed a crime, an unforgiveable crime. He dares to suggest that it would be a good thing to defragment a hard disk approaching 80 % full, even if it is not normally necessary, because your Mac can act quircky, while all technicians know it is absolutely unnecessary. All? No, most technicians (some disagree). And he has the gall to give us links to articles he apparently didn’t bother to read, if we believe a previous post graciously giving us one of these same links, probably fearing we hadn’t seen it when reading the article! The author even dares to say defragmentation is a controversial topic.
Guys, have you really read the article?
Personally, I run Mac Janitor about once a week and on the first of every month. I notice that the OS and programs perform better when I do. I don’t bother with the “cron” programs, because with all of my macs, when I walk away, I put them to sleep.
I repair file permissions once a month. I find that this pre-empts a lot of flakyness.
Fragmentation? Hasn’t happened yet.