10 Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow Mac

[chscag]

Well, I did some snooping around in the synology forums and elsewhere and it seems that they're all in agreement; that you can not boot directly from a sparsebundle backup. You must be able to boot first either with a disk or from the recovery partition and then restore from the sparsebundle backup. Thinking about that a bit more... you can always do a network boot and then recover from the sparsebundle.

 

[MacInWin]

Good to know. Thanks! The network boot is always a good solution if you have a reasonable network available. In some ways, the network boot has me less worried about a boot drive failure because with the backups, even if the bootable one dies, too, I can still get my data back from the TM (sparcebundle or not) backups. If the TM drives die, I have the CCC backups. I would be wiped out if, say, a major surge in the lines took ALL of them out, including all the surge suppressors and battery backups in the power path, but hey, if that much juice flows through the wires, I've got bigger problems than just the loss of data! When major lightning storms come through in the summer, I disconnect all my external drives from both the Macs and the power lines to isolate them as much as I can. Of course, a major EMP would wipe them out, too, but as I said, if that's the cause, I've got bigger problems to solve (or I'm dead and don't care).

Can you tell I worked in risk management for a while?

 

[pm-r]

Of course, a major EMP would wipe them out, too, but as I said, if that's the cause, I've got bigger problems to solve (or I'm dead and don't care).

Can you tell I worked in risk management for a while?

I think it's peeking its head out from around a hidden corner…






- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Patrick, it was fun to sit around and imagine disaster scenarios. We even a total global thermonuclear war exercise just to see what MIGHT still work. Answer: not much. D'oh!

 

[harryb2448]

Goodness Jake used to do that in the Army back in the fifties showing those terrifying movies made out in Nevada somewhere on the effects of nuclear explosions. The only things that seemed to work afterwards were cockroaches.

 

[happyhacker]

I have an issue which is not really a slow Mac but slow Safari and a slow Mail - on occasions. If when Safari is slow (not quite freezing) and I go to Chrome it loads the URL straight away (while Safari sits there). Same with Mail and my other email app. The MAC in general is not slow on these occasions. Any advice welcome.

Also, I only use TM for backups and expect to get a full restore from it say if all collapses and has to go for repair or whatever. Am I safe in the worst event?

Many thanks.

 

[harryb2448]

Helps if you tell us about your Mac. How full is nthe hard drive, how much memory installed and its operating system.

I'll let Jake break the news to you about Time Machine. The other alternative is cloning the entire contents to an external hard drive, which will then be bootable to get one out of trouble.

 

[MacInWin]

Thank you, Harry!

@happyhacker, TM backups are fine and you should get a full restore (assuming you have not excluded anything from the backup). You are pretty safe. However, what Harry referred to is that to USE that TM backup in the event of a "worst" event, you'll need to be able to boot your Mac, and that's not easy with TM. You didn't mention which version of the OS, but if it's ElCap or newer, you can boot into a Recovery mode and then it will boot from the TM backup. However, the TM backup itself is not bootable. As Harry said, the alternative to TM is to CLONE your boot drive using a product like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper! both of which will make a complete copy of your boot drive and make it bootable as well. That way if your internal drive fails, you can immediately be functioning again from the clone. And when you repair/replace the dead internal drive, you can then clone the external drive back to the internal one and be on your way. But CCC and SD! are not free like TM.

Personally, I use both methods. I have TM set to back up daily at noon and midnight using TimeMachineEditor (or you can use TimeMachineScheduler to do the same thing). I also have CCC set to do a full clone every day to a different external hard drive at about 1 am. For my wife's machine, I use CCC to back it up to an external drive and also use Chronosync to sync her business Mac and her laptop Mac every night, which is a "sort of" backup. I have, in the past, had a simultaneous failure of both the internal drive and the backup drive, which lead to losing the data totally, so I have a paranoia about backups.

BTW, Harry despises TM, thinks it not fit for human use. I'm slightly more sanguine about it. TM has it's uses and is pretty good at what it does, plus it's free and easy to use. It's a personal decision.

 

[seadoodude]

Some good tips but I don't agree with all of them.

I use FileVault without any problems on my RMBP laptop for security reasons and do not experience any noticeable difference in speed. I love TimeMachine and as a software developers it is great to go back to a previous version of the code with ease when something goes wrong with code changes. Of course it is a good idea to also use a secondary backup strategy like cloud based CrashPlan or similar. I also like CCC as others have mentioned for occasional full backup clone.

With years of experience using MacOS and being the neighborhood fix it guy, I have found the single best method to speed up a Mac is to clean the caches every year or so. I think you can do it manually if you know what you are doing, but I use CacheCleaner from NorthernWorksSoftware and recommend it to anyone with a slow OS X computer and spinning cursor.

6 Ways to Speed Up Your Mac - Kingston Technology

There are a few ways to speed up a slow iMac or MacBook that doesn’t require any hardware or software upgrades.

www.kingston.com

This is OS version dependent so get the correct version and perform the thorough deep cleaning option on occasion.

It is also very important to occasionally check and fix HD problems using DiskUtility and before any upgrade and after every time something happens that prevents a proper shutdown, like power outage. Boot up in recovery mode to fix any issues found with DiskUtility.

 

[pm-r]

The other alternative is cloning the entire contents to an external hard drive, which will then be bootable to get one out of trouble.

And the fact that such a method is much easier and much faster than the TM method, and I'm close to agreeing with Harry regarding TM and it's "reliability" from too many experiences I've witnessed on various user's Macs. But I read on this forum that it might have improved.

Helps if you tell us about your Mac. How full is nthe hard drive, how much memory installed and its operating system.

And so we know how old might be with normal use.


PS: I'd say if the slowness is only happening with Safari and Mail, I'd sure suspect something goofy with your ISP, connections, modem model and settings, as well as the DNS settings being used.

First thing, they some sleet tests using various sites. Just google 'speediest'.

speediest.net is one that is often used.






- Patrick
======

 

[happyhacker]

Helps if you tell us about your Mac. How full is nthe hard drive, how much memory installed and its operating system.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014)

Available: 387.7 GB (387,702,427,648 bytes)
Capacity: 499.1 GB (499,099,262,976 bytes)

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP111.0138.B17

Volumes:
EFI:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s1
Content: EFI
Volume UUID: 0E239BC6-F960-3107-89CF-1C97F78BB46B
disk0s2:
Capacity: 499.42 GB (499,418,034,176 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s2
Content: Apple_CoreStorage
Recovery HD:
Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s3
Content: Apple_Boot
Volume UUID: 686CC397-1B71-3C12-8E65-861F714BE72D

I have a 1TByte drive I use for backups with TM. Can I use this for a copy then I can take it once (presumably) and then use TM to recover last dated files (presumably by overwriting the complete user directory). What would be the recovery procedure for a complete restore from these two mechanisms? Is there an online advice and script to run for this? I see the hard drive has a recovery section(s) if so what are these used for?

If I take the option of handing it to a service outlet for repair and recovery with the latest TM backup will they be able to bring it all up-2-date?

 

[happyhacker]

I have a 1TByte drive I use for backups with TM. Can I use this for a copy then I can take it once (presumably) and then use TM to recover last dated files (presumably by overwriting the complete user directory). What would be the recovery procedure for a complete restore from these two mechanisms? Is there an online advice and script to run for this? I see the hard drive has a recovery section(s) if so what are these used for?

If I take the option of handing it to a service outlet for repair and recovery with the latest TM backup will they be able to bring it all up-2-date?

 

[AudioApe]

Good suggestions all. I keep Activity Monitor in my dock for easy access.
On this Mac Book Pro I normally have only two apps running, Firefox and Thunderbird. When things get slow it's usually because I have too many tabs open in Firefox.
My first experience with anything like Time Machine was on Windows ME. It featured that sort of automatic backup, and slowed things down terribly. I have only used Time Machine once on a friend's Mac. The initial backup took forever, and I'm not sure that it ever finished. I use CCC on my PPC Macs and just make backup Disk Images for the laptop.

 

[MacInWin]

happyhacker, when TM makes the first backup, it copies EVERYTHING to the backup drive. Then, when the next backup is taken (default is hourly), all it copies are files that have changed since the last backup. The changed files are archived, that is, kept, into folders with the date/time of the backup. When you invoke TM as an application from the Dock or Applications folder, A finder screen opens with a series of folders behind it, along the right edge are indexes for the backups going back in time. To restore a file, you scroll back to that date and time where you know the file was good, find it and then click "Restore" and the file is put back where it was as it was at that time. The other major use of TM is to restore a full drive either because the drive died or you got a new machine or you reinstalled a fresh installation of macOS. At the first boot screen you get an opportunity to "migrate" data from another drive. Pick that option and your account will be restored exactly as it was when the backup was made.

As for recovery partitions on a drive, in the last few iterations of OS X and macOS, Apple has implemented a small bootable partition called Recovery that can boot your system in an emergency and let you get to some tools to try to repair the drive and maybe reinstall the OS. They did this because they no longer distribute the OS on any media, just online. In the earlier days, if one had problems the solution was to boot from the CD or DVD and repair from there. With the demise of CD/DVD disks, Apple put that emergency boot area in play and now has a way to boot over the Internet as well.

Read this:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314
and this:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250