Wow, folks, I really hate it when I have to disagree with a guru,
but....Chris wrote:
<So you don't have to worry about doing a desktop rebuilt in OS X.
As for defragging, you really don't have to worry about that either.
OS X takes care of that for you as well. There may still be reasons
to defrag (such as you do massive amounts of high speed data swaps in
small chunks, like run an active database or file server, so your
drive might become fragmented faster than normal and that
fragmentation can cause unwanted decreases in performance), but
chance are, if you are a person that needs to defragment, then you
already know that and know why. But if you are just a normal user and
aren't sure if you need to defragment, then you probably don't need
to every worry about it under OS X.
You also may not need to run Disk First Aid or any other disk
checking utility very often, it depends on how often you reboot your
computer. If you turn your Mac off every day, then chances are you
will almost never need to run a disk checking tool, as OS X does it
for you (and does any needed repairs) every time it boots. If you are
like me and pretty much never turn off your computer, and thus may go
extremely long periods of time between reboots, then you may still
want to run Disk Utility and have it verify the disk from time to time.>
I don't disagree with you, Chris, concerning that it's a good idea to
repair permissions periodically, but even normal users should defrag
periodically as well, and even on OS X, user-directed maintenance is
still a good thing. OS X may take care of itself better than the prior
OS's did, but we still have to help it along including defrag. But no one
has to spend an arm and a leg on Disk Warrior just for routine
maintenance -- for people on a less tight budget who feel safer owning
Disk Warrior in case of severe HD problems, that's fine, but it's not
necessary for anything other than hoping to keep an almost-dead HD
running while waiting for the new one to come in!.The "Verify Disk" and
"Repair Disk" functions in Disk Utility can be run on a schedule
convenient to the user (along with repairing permissions of course), and
once those are done, there's a $30 program called iDefrag out there for
OS X. That's certainly a lot easier on the wallet than Disk Warrior!
(Which, I'm told, doesn't do defrag anyway.)
When I was totally on OS 9, I had a weekly maintenance schedule of
running Tech Tool Pro, then Norton Speed Disk on my HD; when I was done
with those, I'd update my CDRW backups. Now I have to do both my HDs "OS
X style" even though one of them doesn't even have OS X installed on it,
so my new Saturday morning ritual is Disk Utility ("Verify Disk," "Repair
Disk" and "Repair Permissions"), then iDefrag, and then update the
backups.
Yes, I leave my Mac on most of the time now. Instead of doing a full
shutdown every night before bed like I used to pre-OS X, I just put it to
sleep. (Wow, I really love that, too.)
About OS X maintenance, read this, especially the part about
fragmentation:
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
To get iDefrag, go here:
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php
And there's also OnyX (freeware):
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070
~Yersinia.
________
"My answer to the covers-every-occasion statement about men's mistakes
that 'it's in their genes' is that if they didn't have in their jeans
what they've got in their jeans, we'd leave them cold, hungry and naked."
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