George in Tulsa May 8, 2011 at 11:01 am

On Defrag

I have done it once, when rehabbing a 12″ Powerbook my daughter passed back to me. She had lots of software on it I didn’t need or want, so AFTER cleaning all that off, I checked the fragmentation state using Drive Genius, and, boy, was it messy. My non-scientific feeling after the degrag was that the machine was snappier.

Since Katie seems to be a big fan of disk cloning, she might be interested to know that Carbon Copy Cloner (and probably SuperDuper and any other cloning program) writes files to the clone sequentially. Meaning the clone is defragged. So if you want to defrag, simply clone and copy the clone back. I’m pretty sure it would be faster because defragging thrashes hard disks, actually less wearing on the drive heads.

There are some other tools you might want to add to your maintenance set.

Maintenance is an option at the same site that provides Onyx. Much the same, less GUI. Same site, “Deeper” for changing Mac system settings.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/

Similarly, TinkerTool provides access to a lot of system settings. Including the (I think) unusual ability to set fonts that appear in system message boxes, etc. http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Hazel does do a good job of cleaning up as programs uninstall. So does Reggie Ashworth’s AppDelete, which is a lot cheaper. http://www.reggieashworth.com/appdelete

I deleted the Intego Security Suite three computers ago, but thanks to Migration Assistant brought along its kruft to each new machine. To my surprise, when I was trying to find what was eating processor cycles, Console reported almost continuous activity by the demented soul of the Intego programs trying to find their body. I was able to find the .plist and preference files, which were HIDDEN in more than one location, and help them find the light in the sky. Console told me I needed to look. But it sure would have been a lot better to have removed them automatically when I uninstalled three computers ago.
Karell May 8, 2011 at 12:06 pm

During the show you mentioned that Daria had a solution to allow your Mac to auto-login, then immediately log out using fast user switching. Can you please provide a link to this? I have to use auto-login for my EyeTV to record, but the security vulnerabilities make me uncomfortable. Thanks!!
1. Makay Murray June 10, 2011 at 6:31 pm
  
  did you ever get that link? i would love that script too.
Ralph May 8, 2011 at 11:34 pm

Applejack is another maintenance tool worth looking at
AppCleaner is an option for uninstalls
Both products are free, and score 4 1/2 stars on MacUpdate
Tim Lahey May 9, 2011 at 1:33 am

Instead of the menu bar meters, one might want to try atMonitor,

http://www.atpurpose.com/atMonitor/

It has a really nice feature in that when you bring up the process list when you click on it, it will try to give you information (e.g., from iUseThis) about the process. This can be useful for uncommon processes. It also will give you information about your GPU and graphics memory which most don’t.
Dale Kosan May 9, 2011 at 7:08 am

To see when the scripts ran las type the following in a terminal window:

ls -al /var/log/*.out

Ok while we are at it: to run the daily script in terminal type: sudo periodic daily (replace daily with weekly or monthly) that works too
1. ProfMac May 15, 2011 at 10:12 pm
  
  Thanks, Dale.
  
  I created a TextExpander snippet for this: /chkmaint, which I type in Terminal. It told me my monthly maint. script is late, last ran on April 1st.
  I guess I could geek it out even more with an AppleScript inside a TE snippet.
Dale Gardner May 10, 2011 at 6:51 am

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m getting a really short version of the podcast – 2:55. The version downloaded from iTunes was this way, as is the version here on the website.

Help?
Mikolaj May 10, 2011 at 6:25 pm

There is one essential thing that I do from time to time and it is to delete “opened attachements” folder that mail is creating in the prefs.

I also try a software that does one thing well – shows graphic representation of files / folders it is Disk Inventory X.

Version of the podcast downloaded automatically by podcaster on iP was ok for me.
n little May 11, 2011 at 6:52 am

Thanks for yet another really useful episode!

You often said that nowadays macs don’t really need a lot of preventative maintenance. I wondered though, how new is new? I’m taking care of a power pc running tiger – would the monthly maintenance I do still be necessary (permissions – os and softwares updates – permissions – maintenance scripts)? Every 6 months I do deeper cleaning on it (caches, pram). Still a good idea?

Thanks again!
Klaus Uhl May 11, 2011 at 8:00 am

I had an interesting need to defragment a volume a few weeks ago.

I have a MacBook Pro as my work computer. For security reasons I keep most of my work files in encrypted sparse bundles. A few weeks ago I discovered that one of my sparse bundles had grown to a physical size of ~60GB although the data on it only occupied ~20GB. Running hdiutil compact on the sparse bundle only released less than 2GB, which was, at first, surprising to me.

However, if you keep in mind that Mac OS X uses a virtual disk (sparse bundle, sparse imaget, etc.) just like a physical disk (you can format it with different filesystems, don’t you) it is clear that the filesystem on a sparse bundle can also get fragmented. And if only one file is located on a block at the end of the allocated bundle space then hdiutil will not be able to compact the bundle.

After defragmenting the volume with Drive Genius hdiutil was able to release the “missing” ~40GB of free space. I also defragmented my other encrypted sparse bundles and could free another ~10GB on my harddisk.
Robert Brown May 13, 2011 at 2:43 am

Windows may looks like it does a better job of uninstalling applications, but in practice, it is terrible. It very frequently simply doesn’t uninstall, or uninstalls but leaves behind huge amounts of cruft. A number of times I’ve seen programs break so badly that they had to be uninstalled, but then could not be reinstalled short of wiping and reinstalling Windows.

The OS X way isn’t perfect, but I’ll take it over the Windows way any day.
Ernie Svenson May 14, 2011 at 8:02 am

Just wanted to say that I enjoyed this podcast (as I do ALL of your podcasts!!). But this one wound up being helpful to my sister-in-law. She has an old 13″ Macbook laptop that started to act funny. She thought the hard drive was getting ready to die, so I ran Disc Utilities and told it to repair permissions. No luck.

When I played with the computer it was doing this weird thing of being unresponsive to clicks, and then slow for some other things. It felt like a software problem more than a hard disk problem so proceeded to the “Zap Pram” suggestion.

I have been using Macs (again, after hiatus) since 2003 and have never been a Pram Zapper, although I’d heard about the salutary effects of PZ. Well, guess what? It TOTALLY worked.

My sister-in-law thinks I’m a genius. Of course, my only genius was that I listened to your Mac Maintenance podcast and absorbed some of the key information. I shall forever remember to Pram Zap, and I will forever appreciate where I learned this valuable technique!

Thanks SO much for an excellent podcast! It’s truly at the very top of my podcast list.
Parker Bennett May 14, 2011 at 11:11 pm

Second vote for Applejack, which automates the terminal commands you can run when booting into single user mode (by holding command-S at startup). It will do an “fsck” check on the disk — effectively the same as Disk Utilities Repair Disk function — and repair permissions, clear caches, etc., then reboot or shutdown automatically. It’s one of the first things I install on any Mac.

For uninstalling apps I really like Synium Software’s CleanApp. It keeps a log of the files when they get installed, and also keeps track of what the “community” of fellow CleanApp users have chosen to uninstall for that app — often filling in the gaps on what weird invisible files might also need to be deleted. It also has other tools (that I don’t use) for “slimming” apps by removing resources, and for finding duplicate files, big files, unused files, etc. I definitely found it worth the money over the free App Cleaner.
Ralph May 17, 2011 at 1:46 pm

I need to repartition a 2T external hard drive.
I would prefer to do this “on the fly”, rather than copy the drive content, repartitioning/reformatting, and reloading.
Drive Genius sounds like it can do the job
Any other applications one would recommend to address this need?
Ken May 25, 2011 at 9:40 am

Thanks for the clarity in all your podcasts. Just a question I need to resolve. You point out the need to retain an ‘original’ disk to start up and troubleshoot the Mac. I understand this but what I have never understood is this. Since I have bought my Mac the OS will have been updated several times. If I try to repair it with the ‘original’ OS that came with my computer might I be doing damage.

Should I in fact keep a clean version of the OS that I update regularly and use that to troubleshoot.

Any thoughts?
Katie June 12, 2011 at 9:30 pm

There were many requests for the solution from Dario regarding having your Mac auto-login to start some background tasks, but then log out using fast user switching. He was referring to a tip originally posted by TUAW. We forgot to post the link in the notes originally, but here it is, an I’m updating the shownotes as well.

Sorry for the delay!

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/07/terminally-geeky-use-automatic-login-more-securely/
Manuel September 22, 2011 at 6:11 am

I’m wondering if there still is a necessity for verify and repair of a disk when it comes to SSDs? Could anyone help me with this?
Luke January 24, 2012 at 6:54 pm

Great show, this has introduced me to lots of new software. I’m running a 2009 mac book pro, these tips are helping me keep it alive.

I’m wondering about physical maintenance.

Is dustiness a problem inside machines?

Any tips for cleaning out laptop keyboards etc?

I’d love to know how Katie and David (and listeners) keep these macs clean over years of use.

Thanks again

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