Mac Mini Maintenance (try saying that 10 times fast)

Marcus,

The Mac mini is a fairly 'sealed' unit. As for cleaning out dust, all you could do is wipe it down occasionally to clear off the dust, as well as keep dust clear around where the mini sits (there are vents around the base for circulation, with the fan vents being at the back of the unit).

As for defragmenting, I have never really had an issue with OS X with fragmentation (not like Windows machines anyway). All I would recommend is that you run Repair Permissions every now and then, as well as run the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts (OS X will run these automatically if you leave your mini on). You can run these manually by running terminal, and typing in the following (Administrator User Required):

$> sudo /etc/(daily|weekly|monthly)

Hope this helps you.

Regards,

Adrian.

Hi Marcus

There's no doubt that your Mac Mini will collect dust both on the outside and on the internals. In order to keep the chassis clean, all you need to do is dampen |(not drench!) a lint-free cloth and very delicately wipe the surface clean. The only risks here of course are actually getting moisture inside the mac and scratching the beautifully finished glossy white plastic on the upper side. If you feel that you need to clear the airflow pathway through your mac, then I suggest that you use a vacuum cleaner to suck air through the vents, hopefully bringing dust and debris along with it. Some people will recommend "Canned Air" which is basically an aerosol can containing... well, air! I wouldn't recommend this product because it leaves the can ice cold and could well cause damage to the particle structure of the circuit boards. It also leaves a chalky residue if applied incorrectly, so it is most probably a safer alternative not to bother!

With regards to keeping your mac in tune, all you really need to do is allow it to run over night without sleeping once in a while. OS X has built in maintenance scripts which run very early in the morning (in some cases they will schedule themselves in order to operate around your usage times), and they simply take care of ensuring that temporary files are cleaned up, and caches are cleared away etc. It's all good stuff. If you feel like running these maintenance scripts as and when you feel they are most required, simply follow this link http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070 and download Onyx. This is a powerful tool which is completely free and it will allow you to schedule maintenance tasks ranging from repairing permissions, clearing caches, and updating pre-bindings (links between documents and their applications). As for Repairing permissions, this can be done in "Disk Utility" and you only really need to do this before and after installing new software or updates etc. However, it is not entirely nesacery.

All in all, you will probably have to worry about keeping the actual case clean rather than the hard drive. There is nothing to de-fragment and nothing to worry about in terms of viruses, spyware or firewalls. Everything is taken care of by the computer, leaving you with a completely reliable and somewhat "far from xp" computing experience.

Hope that I may have been of help
-Pos

There's really not a lot you can do in this regrad I'm afraid. That's without opening the unit yourself.

By the way, I don't know how you guys can call the Mac mini a reasonably sealed unit. Give the capacity of the fan, the air it blows out must come into the unit somewhere (most likely the optical drive slot).

924/3370

Hi Marcus,

Yes, the constant airflow caused by the fan builds up a thin layer of dust all over every component inside, over time. It doesn't move, it's just like snow in winter, and it affects, slightly, only the overall temperature of the Mac, as it grows thicker and thicker.

Blowing it is a bad idea IMO, as it can push some of it into remote, hidden holes or places within components, and become a problem.
Vacuuming is the way to go. Unfortunately, it doesn't work much, because there are so many open vents all around.

The best is to wait until you have another good reason to open the Mini.
Have a look at the Take Apart film linked here:
- http://www.macintouch.com/macmini/review.html#links
and the detailed pictures here:
- http://www.applefritter.com/MacMini_Take_ApartGuide


Mac OS X maintenance

Defragmentation is taken care of automatically in Mac OS X (except for files bigger than 20MB), as well as best possible location of the files on the hard disk, on-the-fly as they are used by an application. Using a defragmenter defeats this constant and active arrangement.

- Mac OS X maintenance is pretty much almost completely automated.

Most of the "maintenance software" commands are safe and harmless -be careful with the System ones though- but they are becoming more and more redundant and useless, at each new version of Mac OS X.

More than maintaining, it is about preventing file corruption, that doesn't happen too often anyway.


All You Have To Do:
- Back up.
- Keep enough free space on the boot volume (10-15% is fine).
- "Repair Permissions" with Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder), after you used Software Update or after you used an Apple application installer.
- Run the three nightly Periodic tasks (AKA "cron scripts") — once a month is fine — as they are not yet completely automated (still the same "sleep delay" behaviour in 10.4.6). ( Cocktail, OnyX, TinkerToolSystem, Yasu...)


More Prudent:
Before an OS Update or Upgrade,
- Disconnect all periphericals.
- Run a "Disk Repair" with Disk Utility from the install DVD. Verify HD's S.M.A.R.T. status in the meantime.
- Much better: rebuild Directory with DiskWarrior.
- You can also clean all (each user separately) account's User, Browsers and Fonts caches ( Cocktail, OnyX, TinkerToolSystem, Yasu...), and
- Check for corrupted Preferences ( Preferential Treatment).

--> Do not unnecessarily clean the system and kernel caches.

Software:
In theory we should not need any extra utility, as we already have Terminal and Disk Utility.
But some small applications like Yasu, TinkerTool System, OnyX or Cocktail for example, offer a nice, friendly GUI to many useful Terminal commands.
File defragmentation is not really needed in OS X
— Even (very rarely needed) free space defragmentation is more risky than a simple (and quite fast since Tiger) OS reinstallation —
but DiskWarrior has a very good approach of rebuilding the Directory.

- Read the Readme and Help files, and do not run a task if you don't know what it does.
- Do not install an application before you know how to uninstall it.
( example Anacron or Macaroni: they work well but redundant and about uninstall (???), or some Microsoft software that too often gets us used to unnecessarily give our admin password...)

- Software Updates: no hurry! Do not download too much at a time, install the OS updates separately, and note that there is (in menu Update) an option "Update and Keep Package" that can fit to your backup strategy.


See also this excellent website:
(The X Lab) Maintaining Mac OS X


Enjoy your Mac!
Axl

925/3371

Hi Pos,

You wrote

"all you really need to do is allow it to run over night without sleeping once in a while"

Sorry but this would be completely useless, even with the old Jaguar and Panther "cron", as you would have to do that at very specific times, not at random once in a while. Furthermore the running (or not) of the three automatic periodic tasks doesn't affect Mac OS X performance in any way, and is only about rotating some log files, rebuilding some databases, nothing to do with caches nor with "etc".

If there is one thing you "really need to do" for Mac OS X, it's
- keeping enough free hard drive space.

(besides backing up of course)

Have a nice week-end!
Axl

whoops! Sorry about that then, I have been lead to believe that the Cron scripts were important maintenance tasks - my bad =)

-Pos

Pos in response to "scratching the beautifully finished glossy white plastic on the upper side" yours came beautifully finished without scratches? My "brand new" Mini came with an inumerable amount of fine scratches on it :/

Outside cleaning just use a duster.....i use a can of compressed air to clean the inside by blowing through the ventilation holes.....though if you want to do a thorough job you would need to open her up - which i do not reccomend.

OS X Maintenance. You really don't need to do anything, there are three scripts that are set to run automatically at 3am in the morning on a daily, weekly and monthly basis I agree with Pos). If you will be leaving you machine on all the time then you need do no more. If not these scripts can be run at any time by you via a third party app such as cocktail or my preference from the terminal.

This is really all the maintenance you need to carry out - though you may also carry out a disk permission repair as detailed above by another member

Yes my mac mini (G4) did come without a scratch and in pristine, perfect - brand new condition. Apple pay such great detail to their design and have extremely strong quality control. I believe that you may have been given a dogey refurb unit and therefore I reccomend that you call Apple and ask for a new system or at least a new lid!

-Pos

Yeah probably. I'm military stationed overseas and I've had nothing but trouble with this mac mini, my first mac. Apparently they don't have extremely strong quality control or it wouldn't have been all scratched up and it wouldn't have stopped working after having it for 4 days. Its one of the new ones so I doubt its refurbed. I'm questioning why I even bought a mac now. I had to send it back to my parents to take into an apple store since they don't have a central location you can send the computer to get fixed and there are no apple stores even remotely near me. I bought it in April and I'm still waiting on it to get fixed. Its extremely frustrating. I'd like to believe apple has high standards but so far I'm not seeing any evidence of the like.

Yes my mac mini (G4) did come without a scratch and
in pristine, perfect - brand new condition. Apple pay
such great detail to their design and have extremely
strong quality control. I believe that you may have
been given a dogey refurb unit and therefore I
reccomend that you call Apple and ask for a new
system or at least a new lid!

-Pos

As part of regular maintenance, would it also be a good idea to erase the free disk space? I've seen that recommended (along with defragmenting).

Carl

962/3408

Hi Carl,

Now this one is a very prudent step!
Yes, it is a good idea, it cannot hurt anyway, and yes it would indeed help in case of a bad sector that would prevent Mac OS X to use it. In case also that erasing free space would be enough to fix it.
That is very theoretical IMO.

"Regularly" would be a waste of time, especially if you have a lot of free MBs...

Just my opinion.
Axl

963/3409

Terminal commands to run them manually:

The Daily:
sudo sh /etc/daily
The Weekly:
sudo sh /etc/weekly
The Monthly:
sudo sh /etc/monthly

or

The Daily:
sudo periodic daily
The Weekly:
sudo periodic weekly
The Monthly:
sudo periodic monthly

or

All three together:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

An update to my previous post. I checked with apple and they wanted to charge me for a replacement lid plus I can't return it because it was a custom system. I took it to an Apple store to get the no power issue resolved and they said it requied an entirely new logic board. Also, they mixed up my contact info on the repair order and I had to call them back to get that straightened out. Headache after headache. I'm still not seeing quality :/ but I'm just someone who sunk roughly 1500 bucks into a system that can't get it fully restored to "new condition" even though I only had it out of the box for 4 days. Maybe I'm missing something, but I doubt it. I guess I'll stick with them a bit longer, but only because I can't get my money back and I already have a dot mac account. I certainly hope it gets better.