Streamlining a Late 2013 MacBook Pro

The bigger the Time Machine storage pool, the greater the depth of backups, and also works better when storage gets low and needs to be pruned. And the less rime managing partitioning, as partitions almost never stay the right size as usage changes.

Avoiding partitioning the same target for same-source backups is preferable. Lose one or corrupt one or fail one or drop one or get stolen one, lose all the backups. One HDD partitioned across multiple systems, with multiple HDD targets for those users, means more users might lose one backup, but nobody loses everything.

Too many folks that have lost too much data if (when?) partitioning becomes corrupted. Partitioning is not a panacea.

The Apple NAS box was Time Capsule.

The equivalent NAS storage now might be from Synology or another vendor, for those vendors offering NAS with Time Machine support. Synology offers some Wi-Fi routers with Time Machine, and which can provide a USB connection for that HDD you’re working with, as well as Wi-Fi.

This Mac installation is possibly headed for configuration simplification and for reinstallation, as some of the sorts of add-ons I’ve mentioned can either hook into macOS in ways indistinguishable from malware, or can introduce pernicious corruptions, or both. Cleaning out app accretion and cruft gets tedious on any computer, after a decade or more of use—and the Apple migration tools do work well.

Your Mac is 9 years old and considered "vintage" by Apple. For one thing, that means it's approaching its end of useful life and parts and service will be harder to get if they aren't already.

How much time and money do you want to spend on a vintage Mac? It's headed toward obsolesce and given 5 to 7 years is a pretty good productive run it's getting to the point where you will be needing a new, or newer, Mac. I'd consider it there already.

This Mac has had various optimization and tweaking loaded, and has an accumulation of kexts for various apps loaded, and whether and what effect that might have is unclear.

It's also loaded—Office and Java and VirtualBox and Photoshop CS5 are not small. Games—Steam is loaded—can also consume substantial resources, too.

8 GB memory isn't doing any favors.

I'd temporarily remove the Bresink tooling, and the DNS proxy app, and OpenVPN*, as a test. Probably Opera, too. BitDefender and Avast, if any of that is still installed.

(*If OpenVPN is not being used to access the internal network of an organization you are associated with.)

If you don't need Oracle Java, remove it.

This looks like an old and overloaded Mac, and one with a few too many tweaks (keyboard and mouse and such, and with security updates off) and with too many kexts loaded for my own preference.

This looks like you've been hammering on performance-related topics for a while too, have loaded various tools seeking to find issues and to improve performance, and (we're here, so...) haven't achieved the performance gains sought. Most of which is probably due to the 8 GB memory configuration, given the current system load.

You're probably headed for a reinstallation to clear up all of what's still installed, as the most expedient way to deal with old system-entwined apps, and any potential corruptions. Not that I suspect that will help all that much with performance, given the load and given 8 GB memory.

If you do decide to replace this with an M1 Mac, go for 16 GB, minimally. Consider 32 GB, given both your usage trends, and given the length of time you keep your Macs. Unified memory on M1 and SSD on M1 is all faster than what you have, but apps and macOS are only going to get larger. And an M1 Mac cannot be upgraded. (It's possible to upgrade the SSD with the MacBook Pro 2013 in use here, but that would be for added capacity and is unlikely to help with performance.)

If SuperDuper! isn't already running on a schedule, I'd get that going or get Time Machine going to external storage—Time Machine is probably disabled given how loaded this Mac is, but your data is undoubtedly valuable to you, and periodic snapshots can be neglected and which can mean data loss. And old hardware fails.

And for completeness, your battery is probably failing, and that can sometimes effect performance; you're past the usual cycle count.

roy_mccoy wrote:

I'm having trouble uninstalling things – for example possible TinkerTool auxiliary files – because Spotlight isn't finding a lot of things. This has been a recurring problem for a while. Everything is checked in System Preferences except Mail & Messages, and there isn't anything under Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations. Is the trick to have it not search your main disk and then delete the main disk from the Prevent list? I added it just now and immediately deleted it so I could find and delete Smart DNS Proxy VPN.app, which I did though I don't know how it could make any difference if I never open it. Likewise BitDefender. I only deleted the app file on both of these.

Corruptions are possible here, as this is an old install and you’re reporting some misbehaviors consistent with corruptions, and as there have seemingly been system-modifying apps installed over time and some of these sorts of apps have corrupted the macOS environment for some folks.

The Spotlight index can be rebuilt manually, and a corrupt Spotlight index can cause other issues including with other areas such as app updates. The Spotlight index is also rebuilt during a reinstallation, unsurprisingly.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

Opera is my main browser, so I'm leaving it at least for the time being. I guess I can try to use Chrome exclusively for a while and see how that goes, but all my bookmarks are in Opera.

Chrome and the rest of the Google apps are not light. Far from it.

I can't find the OpenVPN app. I find these files, but only on my backup disk:

…

You say I'm probaby headed for a reinstallation, though it may not help much. I can try that after doing a clone backkup, though I don't know how long it will take with the not-particularly-stellar Internet connection here. This would be cmd-opt-r on restart, I suppose – anything else I should know on this?

Usual re-install is entirely local, and either from a clone or from a Time Machine backup.

I’d prefer to have a couple of backups here too, as I’ve seen both backup mistakes (whoops. wrong direction) and hardware failures happen, and one copy can become no backups far too quickly. Either two or more clones or pair of TM, or a mix.

Time Machine runs whenever the new 5TB disk is connected, but I've always run SuperDuper! manually and don't know if I want to do that differently. What I might do is make a weekly Calendar reminder (often enough for me, particularly with Time Machine running) and try to be disciplined about always answering the call.

It;s your data. TM runs itself, a d generally works pretty well. With infrequent backups, data is exposed longer. TM gets multiple copies of your files, as they change. With Clones, you can potentially end up with one. Or zero, if the source fails during re-generation of the sole target. I’m not sure how you’re running SuperDuper! here. Rotating clones is a fine strategy, but re-generating one clone using the same target storage for the clone each time, not so much—if something fails mid-clone, you’re in deep sneakers.

Speaking of Calendar, it's been reminding me every morning for months to buy a new Mac. This is a good bit more awkward than doing a backup, out here in the Costa Rican boonies with the nearest Apple Store three and a half hours away if I had a car. But I guess I can do it over the Internet straight from Apple.

M1 is more power efficient, which might help (somewhat) here.

Apple often offers an in-store pickup option, which might have some advantages here.

You're right, the battery may be going even though I had a new one put in two years ago. It's showing 1094 cycles with 1000 apparently being the normal max.

That’s heavy computer usage and battery usage for ~two years. Macs are reliable and do usually last a while, but that’s harder usage than most. And that on a Mac itself nearly a decade old.

Download and run EtreCheck and share the results ro the clipboard. Then open a new reply here, and press the button that looks like a printed page to get an additional text box big enough to,paste the hardware and software configuration report here, and paste that report here.

Usual suspects are add-on anti-malware apps, add-on cleaner apps, add-on VPN client apps, or similar. Or that this is nearly a decade old, and is getting comparatively slow.

Lots of threads are normal. Kernel task is the operating system and related activities.

Not a huge fan of partitioning devices, due to the failure modes, and the hassles. There are cases where I would partition, but it’s not my first choice. Let APFS deal with that, and with the necessary partitions.

I’d tend to skip installing any add-on Seagate apps, save those apps specifically for diagnostics if and when that’s necessary, and there are usually other ways to get diagnostic data. HFS+ macOS Extended journaled or APFS would be typical here, depending on your goals.

Partitions are a somewhat risky approach for multiple backups, as one failure or one corruption can clobber all. Use multiple separate devices for better resilience, and not partitions. When they fail, SSDs tend to fail catastrophically, while HDDs tend to fail somewhat more slowly and incrementally.

The Time Machine target is usually best two or three or four times the size of the source device.

If you have the budget for it, Network Attached Storage (NAS) with Time Machine Support is preferable when working with a portable device, as the backups will operate while the laptop is in range of the Wi-Fi, and not just when connected directly to the backup device.

Generally… Lots of questions in one post tends to gets tangled, and questions get missed, or questions and answers can get confusing.