Properly Maintain Macbook pro

Hi M,

Software Update (up in the Apple menu)

Background maintenance

Repair permissions

Repair disk

Most people do little or nothing along these lines.

charlie

You don't really need to do much. Defragmentation is done in the background, there's no need to do it normally. You'll probably find recommendations for cache cleaning and whatnot, but such things are unnecessary and even potentially harmful to your Mac's performance. Just verify the hard drive periodically (I always do this before installing any updates in Software Update), and repair it if any problems are found. Permissions can't hurt to repair, but this is not necessary as regular maintenance... just do it every now and then when you think about it, and be aware of permissions messages you can safely ignore.

Overall, just use and enjoy your Mac and don't worry so much as you used to with Windows.

Myndset wrote:

I recently came from a windows user to now becoming an Apple user. I just bought a new macbook pro and i was wondering on how to maintain the life of its software. Coming from a windows user, the two main maintnance uses were both: SCAN DISK and DISK DEFRAGMENT... we as window users did this if not need of weekly, atleast monthly. What techniques do you have for me and others who wonder the same. Thank you.

There isn't a requirement to do any maintainence on a Mac with OS X, it's all performed in the background.

All you have to do is

1: Use Apple menu > Software Update

2: Update web browser plug-ins (Flash, Silverlight) Java updates are currently handled by Apple

3: Backup your entire boot drive with two powered external drives, one for TimeMachine (Apple included) and another a Carbon Copy Cloner which is a "hold option key bootable" in case your main hard drive dies or you can't boot OSX for some reason.

No maintenance is necessary. It's more a matter of knowing what not to do.

Don't install garbage software such as commercial "anti-virus" products. In fact, don't install any third-party software that needs an installer, unless (a) you know how to uninstall it, and (b) you want to become an expert troubleshooter. Software that you get from the Mac App Store or install by drag-and-drop into the Applications folder is OK (if you trust the source.)

Never enter your admin password when prompted by a third-party application unless you know exactly what is going to happen and how to undo it.

Ignore the nonsensical recommendations that you'll see in these forums to waste money on expensive third-party utilities such as "Disk Warrior" or "Tech Tool Pro." Spend the money on backup devices instead, If you have backups, you don't need the utilities.

The one thing you absolutely must do is make regular, redundant backups. That applies to all computing platforms, not just the Mac.

Sigh. As I said, background maintenance. Yes, it may run automatically, if your Mac is booted between 3:15am and 5:30am every day, and/or if you sleep/wake your Mac.

Here is Apple's article:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107388

Neither situation applies to me or many other Mac users, so we should, in fact, run maintenance scripts. Anyone can check the last time the daily, weekly, monthly scripts were run by opening Terminal and pasting in the following:

ls -al /var/log/*.out

For those people stating that no one needs to run these scripts or that they're somehow dangerous, please reconsider before posting inaccurate things like that.

OnyX will run all the scripts, clean out caches so they can rebuild so they are slimmer, do other cleaning and troubleshooting aspects.

Far as Unix level maintenance it's really not necessary now` in 10.6, or else Apple would have included it in every OS X reboot.

If the machine is running 24/7 then it more necessary as the log files can grow quite large, that's why it's set to run in the middle of the night when most people sleep.

http://www.titanium.free.fr/

I run all of OnyX's cleaning and maintenance aspects about once every few months or so, just for the **** of it, because I like a very lean and tight running machine, it's more for my pleasure than anything necessary.

"OnyX will run all the scripts, clean out caches so they can rebuild so they are slimmer, do other cleaning and troubleshooting aspects."

Indeed. 😉

"Far as Unix level maintenance it's really not necessary now` in 10.6, or else Apple would have included it in every OS X reboot."

Do I really need to point out the logical fallacy in that?

"If the machine is running 24/7 then it more necessary as the log files can grow quite large, that's why it's set to run in the middle of the night when most people sleep."

Your inside source from Apple confirming that's their reasoning? As you well know, log files can grow extremely large in many other circumstances (so I'm not sure why you make comments like that).

"I run all of OnyX's cleaning and maintenance aspects about once every few months or so, just for the **** of it, because I like a very lean and tight running machine, it's more for my pleasure than anything necessary."

So you're saying you believe it's useful to you, but not to other people. Hmmm. Well, I agree with the first part; I also run it periodically.

I think I've given an accurate picture of things, so I'll leave it to perceptive readers to see the truth of the matter. 😉

For those people stating that no one needs to run these scripts or that they're somehow dangerous, please reconsider before posting inaccurate things like that.

I haven't seen anyone stating that the scripts are dangerous. Clearly, they aren't. They are, however, unnecessary if the system is rebooted every day. The only exception is the periodic daily script 100.clean-logs, which deletes symbolic links in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter to crash and panic reports in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports older than 60 days. The reports themselves are deleted by a different process. Conceivably, if this script didn't run for a long enough time, the boot volume might fill up with broken symlinks to deleted crash reports. How long would that take?

Well, a symbolic link takes up 77 bytes of storage space. Storage devices, however, allocate space in minimum units of one sector, which is usually 512 bytes. Some of the newer 3 TB hard drives have a 4096-byte sector size. So let's make some worst-case assumptions. Your boot drive is 3 TB, and you have only 1% of that space free, which is 30 GB. You generate 100 crash reports a day -- those being only crashes of system processes, of course, not user processes, which are logged to a different place. So your volume is filling up with symbolic links at the rate of about 400 KB a day. At that rate, it would take only about 75 years to fill it up completely.

So you're quite correct. If your system is always shut down -- not in sleep -- between the hours of 3:15 and 5:30 AM every day, you should manually run 100.clean-logs at least once every 75 years. Let's say once every 25 years, to be on the safe side. Thanks for pointing that out.

tjk wrote:

"Far as Unix level maintenance it's really not necessary now` in 10.6, or else Apple would have included it in every OS X reboot."

Do I really need to point out the logical fallacy in that?

What I'm trying to say is if Apple deemed it necessary for everyone to run the scripts, regardless of their use pattern, they would have included a script check with every reboot and ran them.

But they placed the scripts to run during a ungodly hour, designed for machines to be running 24/7 that need a little extra care because they are not rebooted often.

There has been rare cases of bloated log files in 10.5, but in 10.6 Apple states that upon a wake, the scripts will run if they haven't. They deemed this enough of a fix.

If this isn't sufficient enough for some (like me and you), then they can run OnyX, but for the majority of users it's not necessary unless a issue comes up from it.

It's far from a requirement like it is on Windows which need anti-virus scans, defragmentation, registry cleaning, Windows Updates and optional updates, this and that wanting a update and the god awlful anti-virus talking to you.

Windows is nothing but pure stress and mayhem, Apple tends to get away from that and provide a better computing experience.

Linc Davis wrote:

So you're quite correct. If your system is always shut down -- not in sleep -- between the hours of 3:15 and 5:30 AM every day, you should manually run 100.clean-logs at least once every 75 years. Let's say once every 25 years, to be on the safe side. Thanks for pointing that out.

ROFL 😁

No offense tjk, guess that answers your question on a technical basis. 🙂

For those people stating that no one needs to run these scripts or that they're somehow dangerous, please reconsider before posting inaccurate things like that.

Nobody actually said they're dangerous, nor even mentioned them before you got huffy for some reason. As to saying that no one needs to run them, well... truthfully, not many do, even in those rare cases where the scripts aren't run automatically. But I'm not going to get into a "Nuh-uhh! Yah-huhh!" debate on this, let's just consider exactly what those scripts do and let the reader decide how important they are. See:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1886195?answerId=8906776022#8906776022

ds store wrote:

Linc Davis wrote:

So you're quite correct. If your system is always shut down -- not in sleep -- between the hours of 3:15 and 5:30 AM every day, you should manually run 100.clean-logs at least once every 75 years. Let's say once every 25 years, to be on the safe side. Thanks for pointing that out.

ROFL 😁

No offense tjk, guess that answers your question on a technical basis. 🙂

I agree it's pretty funny, but I suspect we have different reasons for seeing humor in it. 😉

tjk wrote:

I agree it's pretty funny, but I suspect we have different reasons for seeing humor in it. 😉

Q: Does a Mac need to run maintenance?

A: Yes, every 75 years, it's best to do it every 25 years just to be on the safe side. 😝

Thomas A Reed wrote:

Nobody actually said they're dangerous, nor even mentioned them

I inferred the "whatnot" (below) to be referring to, among other things, log files, and how running mainentance scripts to delete them could be "harmful." Certainly "harmful" and "dangerous" do not have the exact same meaning, so it must all be a misunderstanding on my part. My apologies.

Thomas A Reed wrote:

"You'll probably find recommendations for cache cleaning and whatnot, but such things are unnecessary and even potentially harmful to your Mac's performance."