Best Apple Maintenance Utility?

Through 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4, Apple has built more smarts into OS X so that less and less intentional maintenance is necessary. The OS takes pretty good care of itself now. Most of everybody's favorite utilities out there are for troubleshooting, not maintenance.

DiskWarrior isn't mediocre. It does what it does better than just about anything else out there. It's just that it doesn't do very much.

The problem is long-time Mac users and Windows users are trained to believe that there must be more maintenance to be done, and in large part that isn't true as much as in the past.

For an audio/video studio, defragmenting the media drives could be a good idea since OS X only defragements files under 20MB, but I'm not in a position to recommend a defrag utility.

Now, if you're doing troubleshooting and not maintenance, then Diskwarrior, Tech Tool, AppleJack, Disk Utility (Repair Permissions), the latest OS X combo updater, and utilities that reset the caches can fix problems. But if you are not having problems, they are not really needed as part of a regular maintenance schedule.

DiskWarrior is the best for fixing directory problems.

Other Mac users like Tech Tool Pro.

Look at these links.

11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac's Performance
http://lowendmac.com/eubanks/07/0312.html

The Top 7 Free Utilities To Maintain A Mac.
http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/thetop_7_free_utilities_to_maintain_amac/

 Cheers, Tom

What makes you dub Disk Warrior as mediocre? For what it does, I doubt you'll find a better alternative then Disk Warrior. To answer your question though, there is no single Mac utility that I would consider "best" any more than there is for Windows or Linux.

It depends on what type of maintenance you have in mind. Tech Tool Pro is great for what it does, and there are several shareware programs such as Yasu that are good for cache cleaning and that sort of stuff.

Fortunately, with Mac OS X and modern Macs, there really is no great need for maintenance on the level that Windows users need. I have been using Macs since they came out and I have three now. My Mac Pro at work is on 24x7 running several apps, serving out web pages, running Windows XP, etc. and I have yet to find a need to do anything to it for maintenance. My PowerMac G5 at home has been running nearly continously since I bought it three years ago and other than having to rebuild the hard drive once after I screwed it up in an experiment, I have yet to find any problems that would give rise to a need for Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior; I just leave it alone and it works.

In a professional environment, you can't go wrong with the combination of Tech Tool Pro and Disk Warrior, but your best bet is to make sure your most important data is backed up daily and that your computers are covered by an AppleCare policy.

Look at these links.
11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac's Performance
http://lowendmac.com/eubanks/07/0312.html
The Top 7 Free Utilities To Maintain A Mac.
http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/the_to
p 7_free_utilities_to_maintain_amac/

OK, see that's what I'm talking about. Many of the items on those lists are great examples of unnecessary tasks and "troubleshooting, not maintenance" tools that aren't really about maintaining a pro shop full of Macs. There's a lot of useless tweakage on those lists that I wouldn't want to burden a shop IT guy's checklist with.

MacJanitor is redundant on Tiger machines because OS X runs those scripts even if you shut down. Maintenance, Cocktail, Onyx, etc. largely run the same set of hidden-preference changers and occasional troubleshooting tricks. AppleJack is a great utility, but again, it's more for troubleshooting, not maintenance. Running a localizer saves disk space, but on a machine with disks large enough for audio/video, the amount of space is miniscule, and localizers are known to screw up some applications.

Basically, a lot of those utilities are great for a single user doing home and office work, but their value can be questionable in a high-volume production environment where the workstations must be reliable and standardized/not excessively customized.

all of these maintenance utilities are nothin but gui fronts for command lines

if you're good with the terminal you hardly need utilities

back to the question, my personal preference goes to onyx and techtools pro

onyx can run the sudo scripts you can run manually aswell as optimising although it is debatably redundant, clear caches and logs etc

techtools pro includes a data recovery feature, can fixed corrupted problems with the disk instead of having to use the tiger disc you have and then doing it through disk utilities

it mainly comes down to personal preference, as said above, most of them do near enough the same things


little snitch is also good for monitoring apps that attempt to access the net without yor permission