Onyx vs. Leopard Cache Cleaner.

Hi hydralucent;

I would say that if you choose Oynx be extremely careful which option you choose to use.

My mistake the other day I clicked on the wrong button and it destroyed my system. I was able to recover using Time Machine.

Never having used Cache Cleaner, I can't comment on it.

Allan

Hi Allen,

My mistake the other day I clicked on the wrong button and it destroyed my system.

I use OnyX to, witch *WRONG BUTTON* did you use to destroy your system?? Would be a help for other OnyX users like myself to know what you did ...

*Thanks for posting back ...*

Dimaxum

Neither. Both can actually cause more problems than they solve. See my user tip on what you need to do for Mac maintenance:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1772235

Anything else is superfluous.

The only functions I use in leopard cache cleaner are the cache cleaner functions, and then only
rarely. Leo doesn't "trash the cache" as often as Tiger used to and rebuilding it when not needed
is not advised.

A good third party disk utility such as Disk Warrior is, in my book, a necessity to keep your hard disk
healthy, it addresses many critical directory structure issues that Disk Utility simply won't find or fix.

Check your system activity in the console logs, many times you can find problems recorded there
such as processes crashing. Fixing these things right away will help performance and reliability.

Last and most important: Keep good backups in case something goes wrong.

Kj

Well, if you spend a lot of time here, you'll see posts such as, "I used X to do Y maintenance, and now Z doesn't work."

You will also find that the people who offer solutions to those problems don't use any third-party "maintenance" software and don't have any problems.

The only two utilities that all the techs at my company use on regular basis are YASU and Disk Warrior. We service over 3000 clients with no complaints. I suggest you use caution when using any utility and read the manual.

Yasu's Clear System cache, local cache, and user cache preferences can yield corruption too in those cache files. I would not use these features unless your data is backed up, and you know for a fact that the cache files are already corrupted. If either of those statements is untrue, do not run Yasu's cache functions.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree about that issue. I see well over a hundred machines per week and run exactly the same thing on them all with no problems. I always close out all applications before doing anything of course. I don't suggest you run it every day, but I'm not sure why you would be seeing so much corruption.

FL_MacTech wrote:
I guess we will have to agree to disagree about that issue. I see well over a hundred machines per week and run exactly the same thing on them all with no problems. I always close out all applications before doing anything of course. I don't suggest you run it every day, but I'm not sure why you would be seeing so much corruption.

I'd agree, in general. As a user of OnyX, I suspect there's a difference in what some folks are talking about. I use it on occasion to clean Application caches, among other things, and the current version automatically quits all apps before doing it. I don't think some of the older versions did that, so perhaps that's why some long-time users are so dead-set against such products.

I hope we are not agreeing about disagreeing about backing up first.

I'm just saying the only time you want to touch cache is if it already is corrupt, and only after backing up.

In other words, there is no point in fixing what is not broken, by deleting caches when they are not damaged.

Caches speed the machine along. People think of these utilities as "optimization" utilities. Quite the contrary, the reason they work as such is if cache files are already corrupt. But if they are not corrupt, which is the majority of the time, the speed gained by having good cache files is significant.

So deleting those cache files basically stops the system from being able to use its own optimization features that are built in!

I think you are being a little melodramatic about stressing the backing up. To be honest I've seen quite a number of corrupted Time Machine volumes thus killing your backup. I'm not saying to not backup, but in my environments that is implied. I am also curious just how do you determine if a cache is corrupt? Like I said in my previous post I don't recommend running something like YASU every day.

Time Machine is a good thing but I also make back up clones of my disk using SuperDuper to an external firewire drive: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

This simple to use program and my firewire drive have proven to be enormously beneficial to me in allowing me to make repairs to my main disk, especially having DiskWarrior on it. Quite frankly it's saved my butt a few times.

I bought both Onyx and Leopard Cache Cleaner thinking they would be great maintenance utilities. It's just too bad that I was so inexperienced at the time that I made all the mistakes that A. Brody has so well detailed. I haven't used either in quite a while but if I did I would only use them to run the daily, weekly, monthly maintenance routines as I turn my Mac off at night. But even that I haven't done for awhile and I seem to suffer no ill effects. Personally I'm leery of both programs now. My last investment was TinkerTool from Marcel Bresink, but unless one knows what they are doing you can make all the mistakes of the other two programs.

DiskWarrior, Techtool Pro, they are my expensive workhorses now.

The most common scenario of corrupt caches is when System Preferences don't launch (and is otherwise present in the Applications folder), and Disk Utility doesn't launch (and is otherwise present in the Applications -> Utilities folder). Similarly, programs that don't launch that used to be able to launch in the same operating system revision which have not been moved typically indicate cache files are going south. If you are clearing caches as a matter of so-called "maintenance" you may actually cause these applications to not be able to launch in the first place. I've seen this happen regardless of the utility used. Sometimes it has gotten so bad as to make the Finder not launch on next login. Attempts to archive and install fail to solve the problem. Suffice it to say, you have to be very careful how you remove caches if you do so at all. I've seen cases whereby I manually remove the caches using the Finder's drag and drop, restart the computer, and then the application launches fine, and then the next restart the application fails to launch again. That persistently recreation of corrupt cache files can be a real pain to deal with.

You don't want to dig yourself a deeper hole in your system by using utilities when they aren't being used for troubleshooting. A healthy system should NEVER have system level caches removed. It uses caches to optimize launch times.