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  • What are the maintenance routines I should be running on my mac, or the disktools I should use to repair it.
    Basic Maintenance covers a number of areas

    1. Repair Disk Permissions
    2. Maintenance Scripts
    3. Caches clearance
    4. Preferences (back up and repair)
    5. Do A File System Check And Repair Disk

    1.Repairing permissions

    You should run Repair Disk Permissions regularly. Once a month, and every time before and after you have installed new software or upgrade software.

    Open Disk Utility, (found in Applications>Utilities) and on the left side of the screen select your hard drive, then select the First Aid tab on the right side and click on "Repair Disk Permissions."

    Permissions repair then ensues, when it finishes it will leave a record in the main window of anything repaired. After it has finished you can quit disk utility.

    See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106712 and
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107298 for more information

    2. Maintenance Scripts.

    The so called "cron" jobs need to be run regularly if you do not leave your mac on (without energy saver) all the time.

    From its link with Unix Mac OS X runs special maintenance scripts automatically between 3:00am and 5:30am each day. There are daily, weekly, and monthly scripts.
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107388

    Now this is supposedly not necessary in OS X 10.4, as they can be run manually and easily whenver you want and the scripts are not run by Cron (these scripts are sometimes called cron jobs)
    but by launchd - this of course may be meaningless to you, at the time of writing this was still reported as not debugged by apple, so a good maintenance utility is needed to run these scripts.
    One of the first mac maintenance utilities to help with this process was MacJanitor, which is FREE
    http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

    3. Clearing Cache

    Actually over time a cache speeds up your computer were the same tasks are repeated, so if you dont have any problems, you may want to leave things be.
    Alternatively, if you mac is slow or you are getting problems it might help to delete the cache.

    There are many apps to help with this, I like mainmenu and applejack at present both can be found at www.macupdate.com.

    4. Sort out your preferences

    Backing preferences up while they work well is a good idea, you can just copy the user preferences folder or use the utility found here:

    http://www.m-t-software.com/software-backup.html

    The best fixer of prefs is Preferential Treatment
    http://www.jonn8.com/html/pt.html

    although many maintenance apps like Mainmenu also do this for you.

    5.File system check and repair.

    Start or restart your mac and immediately after the start "chime" hold down the shift key to start in "safe" mode. This automatically checks the hard disk for errors and repairs them...it can take a while for start up to occur.

    Alternatively download and install Applejack and follow the instructions for use:

    http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack

    for continuing errors and problems I rely on Disk warrior

    http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

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