Maintenance scripts, whats that all about?

Yes, the Keebler elves are busy late at night keeping the computer problem free!

There are three maintenance scripts that Unix runs on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. The scripts are run automatically between 3 and 5 am provided the computer is turned on and not sleeping. The scripts perform certain general maintenance chores such as deleting old log and temporary files, rotating the logs, and updating the lookup database.

These maintenance activities prevent log files from growing to unwieldy size which also tends to keep the logs from becoming corrupted. This does help keep OS X running smoother, but they hardly keep OS X completely free of problems. Other efforts are needed:

Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance

For disk repairs the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior. DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. However, DW is not yet compatible with Intel Macs. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 is Intel Mac compatible.

OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility called Macaroni that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.

OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.

I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.

For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.

When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.

Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is significant):

1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk 6 (Shareware)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. SuperDuper (Commercial)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - not universal binary.)
7. LaCie SilverKeeper (Freeware - not universal binary)
8. RsynchX 2.1 and PsyncX 2.2.1 (Freeware)

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.

Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.

Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Hi Chris!

See this topic OS-X maintanence vs. MacJanitor/Cronaid.

But as your question is different than the OP's Answered issue, if you have any additional questions, please start a new topic here Using Mac OS X Tiger

On Forum pages, there is an option to Post New Topic.

ali b

I turn my computer off when I go to bed. I run the maintenance scripts myself from the Terminal when I happen to think of it, using this command to run them all in one fell swoop:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

hit return, enter password (which is not echoed to the screen), hit return again and go do something else for awhile.

I acutally use the locate database occasionally, so it is nice to have it up to date. And rotating the logs and cleaning out junk is alway nice. If you want to know in detail what is done you can read the output in your Console application, which you launch from your Utilities folder. Click the Logs icon in the upper corner, then click the disclosure triangle in front of /var/logs and then click daily.out to read its output, ditto for weekly.out and monthly.out.

This all does next to nothing in terms of maintenance. But then my experience is OS X doesn't require much maintenance. Before a system update I generally repair permissions and repair disk, backup everything if I haven't already done that, do the update and repair permissions afterwards. That's about it.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Hi Rob!

This is when your Mac automatically runs the Tasks.

Daily: 3:15 AM
Weekly/Saturday: 4:30 AM(Panther) 3:15 AM(Tiger)
Monthly/First Day Of The Month: 5:30 AM

So if you wanted, you could choose a particular time to leave the Mac on.

ali b

3891

Hi Ali, Rob,

These times since Tiger are true if your Mac never sleeps.
Since 10.4.2 if you put it to sleep at night, the tasks will run delayed by the total sleep time since last reboot.

Yes, Kappy should update his tip,
but I'm very much with Francine, as Mac OS X big maintenance multiple steps are become quite very much almost completely obsolete, now that things have been improved even more.
Harmless though, but overkill.

All your Mac OS X system really needs IMO:
- backup
- at least 15% free space on the boot volume
- the three log scripts once a month
(BTW you can use your Mac while they're running; just don't quit Terminal)
- repair permissions after using an Apple installer or Software Update
- repair disk (Disk Utility from the Mac OS X install DVD) before important updates/upgrades or twice a year

Even defragmentation is a waste of time and defeats Mac OS X smarter HD space dynamic arrangement on-the-fly.

Axl

Thanks Axl!

I should have included the caveat about the Mac not being in sleep mode.

But I did forget about, the delayed running of the scripts in Tiger.

For future reference, do you know where that is documented?

Thanks Again!

ali b

3893

You're welcome Ali!

" For future reference, do you know where that is documented?"

It is not documented anywhere that I know of.
Please see our discussion about it in the Lounge for all available info and comments.

You can easily test it yourself by running the ls -al /var/log/*.out command day after day, and writing down your sleep times.

Not worth the hassle though.
A very unimportant matter, really.

🙂
Axl

We're glad to have helped.



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Can anyone tell me if there is a way to reschedule when these maintenance scripts run.

For example, my iMac is almost always running (and not asleep) between 7pm and 11pm, so sometime between there would be more sensible than the early hours of the morning.

I see I can run manually, but would rather have it auto-scheduled (I want a low maintenance computing lifestyle - which is why I bought a mac!!!)

Thanks, Chris

Hi Rob,

this article might help: Mac OS X 10.3/10.4: System maintenance

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