Newby Question Regarding Apps

[asimmd]

Hi All

I have had my Mac Mini for a month now,and being my very first Mac I can say I am really pleased with it.

Coming from a PC to the Mac was easy enough but on the PC I needed to defrag the drive,clean files that were left behind by programmes etc.

Do I need to do any of this House Keeping on my Mini,and if so which Apps would I need?

Thanks

Alan

 

[Macclone]

Hi All

I have had my Mac Mini for a month now,and being my very first Mac I can say I am really pleased with it.

Coming from a PC to the Mac was easy enough but on the PC I needed to defrag the drive,clean files that were left behind by programmes etc.

Do I need to do any of this House Keeping on my Mini,and if so which Apps would I need?

Thanks

Alan

There are disk utilities that come with the Mac, but I don't use them unless I am having a problem.

 

[Fishrrman]

For defragging, I've been using Drive Genius and it works well.

 

[toad77]

I always thought you didn't need to defrag the hard drive on OS X 10.2 and higher unless you got below a certain amount of available free space.

 

[benwiggy]

Generally: No.
You do not need to empty caches, "repair permissions", clean your memory, defrag, or do any housekeeping on your Mac, and it will run fine.
There are three scheduled maintenance tasks, which run automatically daily, weekly and monthly.

• Defragging is done automatically in the method that OS X uses to save data on disk.
  
• Most programs that claim to "clean", "sweep" or otherwise fix your Mac usually cause more problems than they solve.
  
• To remove most programs, just trash the app. There may be a 4Kb file left over in your preferences folder, but with a 1Tb drive, that's nothing to worry about. It's not going to do any harm -- it'll just sit there.
  
• People often talk about using Disk Utility to "repair permissions". This was necessary in earlier versions of OS X, but now does very little. It only affect some Apple system files, and always reports error messages that it never fixes!
  
• There are even apps for sale on the App Store that "clean your memory". All they do is flush the Inactive Memory. Inactive Memory is that which has been used by recently quit apps, but remains available to those apps if they are relaunched. However, if that memory is needed by running apps, it will get overwritten. So apps that clean your memory are a WASTE of money.

If you DO develop a problem with your Mac, then it might be time to empty some cache files, verify the disk, check that preference files are parsed correctly, etc. I recommend a utility called Onyx, which is very powerful and easy to use: but you do NOT need to run it regularly "prophylactically".

 

[simon.hibbs]

Years ago I sometimes need to run the "Repair Permissions" option in Disk Utility, which did fix some performance and behavioural issues, but in recent versions of the OS I don't think that's necessery. It's useful to know it's there though I suppose.

One free tool I do find very useful in Grand Perspective. It shows disk utilisation using an interactive area map. It very effectively shows you what apps and data files are using up your space. Very useful, but it's fixing a user level problem (I've downloaded too much crap, I don't play that 6 GB game anymore so I can get rid of that, etc) rather than a system problem.