Self Maintaining

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I heard that the mac is self maintaining and I was wondering what exactly does the mac do and when?

I also wanted to ask if its possible to let the mac auto clean a map? Like the downloads map.
 
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chas_m

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The Mac is self-maintaining to a limited extent. In normal use, there is very little the user needs to do -- but there are a few practical things that must be done.

1. Keep backups, and keep them current. Macs are awesome, but the hard drives inside them are exactly the same as the ones in PCs, and will fail one day.

2. OS X needs lots of temp room to work with, so make sure the hard drive has plenty of free space on it. I generally tell people that once you fall below 20GB of available free space, you're asking for trouble. Some people would rate that even higher than I do.

3. Every now and again (and I literally mean this, as in very occasionally), a run through with a third-party maintenance tool like OnyX isn't a bad idea at all. I use a similar tool called AppleJack (as well as OnyX) and tend to run it whenever a system update forces me to restart. Works as a maintenance schedule for me.
 
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But you don't know what the mac does to maintain itself? Empty cache? Delete cookies? Delete old files? .... ?

Everybody says the mac cleans it selfs up, but no one seems to know what the mac exactly does. Btw, no one knows answer for my second question?
 
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chas_m

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I didn't answer your second question because I have no idea what "auto clean a map" means. Maybe you could clarify?

As for what the Mac does to maintain itself, of course I know. It does several things, including automatic deletion of temp files, auto-defragmenting (files under 20MB), auto-optimizing (google "Mac drive hot zone" if you want to know more about that), and runs routine UNIX scripts for daily, weekly and monthly maintenance, which includes such things as log rotation, clearing temp files, garbage collection and cache maintenance.

More detail that I could ever go into here:
Running Mac OS X Maintenance Scripts
 
OP
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I didn't answer your second question because I have no idea what "auto clean a map" means. Maybe you could clarify?

As for what the Mac does to maintain itself, of course I know. It does several things, including automatic deletion of temp files, auto-defragmenting (files under 20MB), auto-optimizing (google "Mac drive hot zone" if you want to know more about that), and runs routine UNIX scripts for daily, weekly and monthly maintenance, which includes such things as log rotation, clearing temp files, garbage collection and cache maintenance.

More detail that I could ever go into here:
Running Mac OS X Maintenance Scripts

Thanks! That was the answer I was looking for.

Auto Cleaning a Map = Automatically delete files from a map. Like the download map. Is their a way that my mac delete files like a one week old file in the downloads map from itself?
 
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Are you using Safari ??

If so Safari>Preferences>General then look down the bottom and set to either Manually delete, When Safari Quits or upon Successful Download.

HTH

Cheers
 
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chas_m

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Thanks for clarifying.

"Map" is not a common term for what you are describing, which is why I found it confusing. "File list" or "directory" would make a lot clearer what you wanted.

I don't use Firefox, but I feel confident in saying that yes, it will automatically clear old entries in its download file list if you want that. It's likely to be in the preferences somewhere. Sorry I can't be more help.
 
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I don't use Firefox, but I feel confident in saying that yes, it will automatically clear old entries in its download file list if you want that. It's likely to be in the preferences somewhere. Sorry I can't be more help.

Well, you can uncheck "remember Download history" but I don't think that will do what the OP wants.
 

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