OS System Maintenance - manually

Friends,

I understand that the OS performs self maintenance between 0300 and 0500 for runs performed daily, weekly and monthly.

As I have the system of during these times, I assume the runs don't happen and as such the maintenance is not performed?

If so, does this cause any system or operational instability?

Are the runs really required?

Should I be running these functions manually? Specifically the daily run?

Appreciate your feedback.

Regards.

Well you can always use the app "onyx" to perform those runs anytime if you want to. But really if you miss doing those runs for a while it shouldn't affect your mac all that much. Cause I believe there would be a large portion of the mac world who doesn't have their computers on at those crazy hours of the night. And all their machines are roughly ok no the whole.

I use MainMenu for all those tasks, I find it very convenient, useful and it has all the features I need.

I thought Oynx wasn't yet compatible with 10.5 ???

Question about general maintenance of Mac OS X

Hi everyone i recently purchased a white macbook 2.16ghz and i just had a few questions about general maintenance of the hardware, these are my q's:

1) is there an apple equivalent of a disk defragmenter and if there is how often should i run this?

2) What other procedures should i undertake to ensure my macbook keeps running smoothly?

There's no built in tool for defragmenting in OS X cause HFS is a very capable file system and maintains it self. However, there is this app, iDefrag, which I've used in the past and had some speed improvements including some fixes to problems. It's a paid software however.

Otherwise there's nothing that you need to run. But you could try onyx for maintenance and such.

I believe that OS X defrags itself when you are not using it

To clean up log files, run maintenance scripts (which run overnight - but I shut my mac down to save energy) and run other clean-up tasks - ONYX does a brilliant job

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

Mac_OS said:

1) is there an apple equivalent of a disk defragmenter and if there is how often should i run this?

2) What other procedures should i undertake to ensure my macbook keeps running smoothly?

Click to expand...

no offence but a simple search would have answered your question but no there isn't a need for defragmenting your disk
and there are several third party apps that will run the built in maintenance scripts whenever you want to.

I'll second that suggestion for iDefrag. You don't need to use it regularly... OS X (or rather, then HFS file system?) does automatically defrag files under a certain size, from what I recall. But iDefrag does do a more thorough job and can show a noticable improvement in some cases. Again... not something I'd use regularly, but maybe once a year or so, perhaps every few months depending on how the computer is used.

As for maintenance... Onyx is free and pretty much does it all.

MainMenu is also great for running the maintenance tasks and such and works great under Leopard.

Thank you to all your replies.

I am still learning a lot about Mac's as I have only transitioned from Windows a few days ago.

Take care.

Del said:

I thought Oynx wasn't yet compatible with 10.5 ???

Click to expand...

There's a beta version out, though admittedly I'd stick to Main Menu until Onyx is out of beta.

Here is a useful article on the tasks which run overnight on Macs.

Here is the Apple document on the Mac OS maintenance tasks that are set to run each night between 3.15am & 5.30am.

While I can't verify that all this info is entirely up-to-date for Leopard, it's worth a read anyway.


Cocktail 4.0.1 [shareware] has a Leopard version available.

AppleJack, OnyX & Maintenance have not yet been Leopardised but as lifeisabeach stated, the beta version of OnyX & Maintenance is available for testing purposes but if you're not up to testing them then it's advisable not to use these beta versions for regular maintenance purposes.

Anacron for MacOS is Leopard compatible.

Anacron runs the periodic daily, weekly and monthly tasks on your Mac even if the machine (a laptop, for example) spends much of its time asleep or switched-off. Anacron silently checks when you reboot and every sixty minutes while the computer is running to see if the various periodic scripts are overdue, and runs them if necessary. The advantage of Anacron over many other solutions to this issue is that it runs as a proper Unix background process, requires no user intervention, and uses the regular periodic scripts.

Click to expand...

Lastly there's Leopard Cache Cleaner.

Leopard Cache Cleaner makes system maintenance simple with an easy point and click interface to many OS X functions.

Click to expand...

MainMenu does basically the same stuff as OnyX and it already works in Leopard.

thank you for everybody's contribution as usual the forum has been most informative, i am currently downloading onyx and looks like just what i needed....

unfortunately, onyx is not compatible with Mac OS 10.5.1 I'm sure there will be an update in the future

Like trav said earlier, MainMenu (correct spelling for a google search) works flawlessly in Leopard.

disk utility > restore permissons I've read this is a good think to run every now and again.

What should I run on main menu other than scripts? Also how do I know when the scripts were last run? Like in onyx.

To see the last tasks that were run you click on Show Log Window. As for what should be run and what the tasks do, this has been discussed a few times and a search would get these discussions for you.