Q: Does anyone have any positive feedback after upgrading to Mavericks?

To each his/her own, I guess.

Like I have stated, been using TTP and DW for many, MANY years without any detriment to my system.

I use this mainly for data/disk repair/recovery and to defrag my internal hard drives from time to time.

I have found that doing a full defrag of just data on my internal hard drives from time to time helps immensely with speeding things up on both my older Mac and my newer iMac.

I do a full defrag of just data using TTP, depending on the amount of regular use, every 2-3 months.

I have never had any issues, drive or data corruption or loss and while I fully know that hard drives can and will fail at some point, the two internal drives that are still in my PowerMac G4 have been subjected to TechTool Pro on many occasions and are still working in that PowerMac after almost seven years without any hiccups.

And I have used TTP only a few occasions within the two years I have had my 2009 iMac.

No problems. Haven't had to use Disk Warrior at all (yet) on the 2009 iMac, either.

So, opinions about Mac drive utilities seems to be of varying and mixed reports and opinions.

Your mileage may vary.

I have a mid-2011 MacBook Air running Lion, and I've been thinking of upgrading to Mountain Lion, primarily so that I can do Airplay mirroring to my 2nd-Gen AppleTV.     

Now I find that though ML will cost me $19.99, I can get Mavericks for free.   So I'm obviously tempted to do just that.   A few questions:

1. MichelPM says 4GB is a minimum of RAM for Mavericks.   That's what I have.  Will I be sorry if I upgrade to Mavericks without installing more memory ?   Is it even possible to DIY memory upgrade in an AIr ?

2. A lot of times, an OS upgrade is considered compatible with older hardware (like mine), but doesn't actually work well.   I gather that is not the case here, right ?

3. Airplay Mirroring will work, right ?

Thanks !

Brian E. wrote:

 

So how do I remedy a "bad block?"

You don't.

Every hard disk has bad blocks, even when they are brand new. Bad blocks are automatically mapped as unusable by the drive's firmware, and bad blocks stay bad forever. As a drive ages and becomes subject to environmental contaminants and other abuses, they become greater in number, growing at an accelerating rate. When bad blocks become too great in number, the disk rapidly becomes unusable. When a hard disk fails in that manner, it cannot be fixed.

Hard disk drives suffer other failure modes caused by other problems, some of them sudden and catastrophic. That's the reason backups are a necessity, if you consider your stored data important. Other than keeping a HD in a clean, dry environment as free as possible from physical abuse, and ensuring the equipment in which they're installed is adequately cooled, there is no way to prevent their eventual failure.

The unit cost for flash memory storage is falling so rapidly that hard disks in consumer grade electronics will soon become as obsolete as phonographs. SSDs don't suffer from the same failure modes, unfortunately they still suffer from different failure modes, which means backups will still be required.

None of these features are worthwhile?

No. They are completely worthless - if you maintain a backup strategy. TTP's only useful purpose would be to "repair" a disk that becomes unreadable so that you can extract data from a hard disk that has failed in a less than catastrophic manner, but in that event some degree of irretrievable data loss has already occurred. The best you could do is extract any data that remains intact, but that's a moot point if you have backups. If you rely upon your Mac for professional work, backups are a necessity.

Apple's Disk Utility can "repair" a disk just as well. It doesn't do "surface scans" though, because it's entirely pointless to do so for the reasons I explained. Using such utilities to check the HD at intervals can do nothing other than accelerate wear, reducing its lifespan.

Overcautious?

As it applies to backups, there is no such thing. On the other hand, such utilities as you describe offer nothing more than a misplaced sense of comfort at best, which is harmful in itself.

Two things need to be pointed out. First, the ASC is sort of an urgant care facility for Mac owners. You aren't going to find lots of positive posts because people come here to find solutions to their problem. Second, OS upgrades are never totally smooth; partly because software is always released before it is ready and partly because no matter how much testing is done before hand someone (lots of someones) will do things the testers never considered.

Over the years I've given lots of advice to computer owners because that has been my job. My best advice for upgrading boils down to 1) have a backup (or 2) in case something goes wrong and 2) don't rush into it. Let others find the bugs. I'm a techie so you'll always find me on the bleeding edge but I have a bootable clone prepared so I can jump right back if there's a disaster and I never upgrade my primary computer until I'm satisfied the OS is ready for my prime time.

Yes, Time Machine is all you need, but redundant or "rotating" backups are advantageous, and backups created using different methods is the ideal strategy.

Time Machine is devastatingly easy to use; its sole control consisting of an "on/off" switch, and its function is highly integrated in OS X. All you need is an external disk. Connect a formatted disk and Time Machine literally does the rest. It even handles "rotating" backups automatically, cycling scheduled backups among the devices available to it.

"Clone" software such as Carbon Copy Cloner is far more customizable. Unlike TM it requires a bit of thought to use, but it can create bootable backup volumes whereas TM cannot. It's not free but it is very well supported. I recommend both. Merely having a backup seems to preclude the need to ever rely upon it.

I used Retrospect for a long time, but Time Machine rendered it obsolete as you said.

Waiting to upgrade is definitely a conservative approach. Though Mavericks has been a remarkably trouble-free upgrade, no OS X version ever ended in "point zero".

I haven't had any problems with the upgrade.  In fact, my computer seems faster now.  I have a 2012 MacBooks pro 15" retina.

Hi Brian

I've just happened onto this discussion as I wanted to see what people are saying about Maverick. I have upgraded and the upgrade went seamlessly. To go back a step I have come from snow leopard straight to Maverick well actually I brought Lion but did not like it so down graded to snow leopard. My experience has been negative with Maverick, I am not a power user all I want to do is switch the computer on and do whatever I want to do, up until snow leopard the mac was doing that for me without any issues  I switched from PC many years ago because of that very fact " to much down time getting the thing going any good ". For me Maverick has made my computer run slow, fan seems to run more often, crashes/freezes at different times, some programs that have been faultless up until now are not working properly even tho they are suppose to be compatible with Maverick, so the overall experience has been bad. I've checked disk space, run programs to clean up the machine and check everything is working okay but nothing seems to get it going as good as it use to. The only reason I upgraded and I think it's why people reluctantly do is any new software you want to purchase is designed for the latest versions available.

Sorry to hear that. start a new thread and describe your issues. Post the link to your new thread here and we can find you easily. Maybe start by giving an Etrecheck list in that new thread, to avoid a lot of questions.

Lex

Hi Brian,

I have never had any problems with Mavericks (first question), not with a clean install, not with an install over an existing installation. It is faster and handles Ram much better.

But Mavericks is different and the most obvious difference is often overlooked: it does not sync the Calendar and the Contacts file anymore through iTunes. These two are handled through iCloud now.

Since I travel a lot between several countries and do not have he best internet connections there (if at all), that was a complication for me, as I necessarily have avoided having everything in the cloud.

I agree with all other posters about backups: have more than one!

Especially the exposé by John and Dwb (hi, you both) are good. One remark though on John's post: he says "If you rely upon your Mac for professional work, backups are a necessity". I disagree, in all situations, also for unimportant personal data, backups are a necessity ! Because at the moment you have a crash and you do not have a backup you find suddenly that you need those data (Murphy's law).

Lex