As a Mac user, you may not consider the task of maintaining your Mac OS as dire as any other Windows user. In reality, maintenance is essential even on the OS X platform in order to keep from facing slowdowns and reducing the chances of a failure lurking in your system. Some maintenance routines should be run diligently, such as disk cleanup tasks, checking and repairing OS X volumes, backing up necessary data, and more. Listed below are a few self-diagnosis or maintenance tips that will help to drive away all your fears concerning Mac OS X.
Tips for Maintaining Your Mac OS X
Back up Your Data
Backups help you fight disasters and fend off data loss in times of crisis. Time Machine, a backup utility built into Mac, does a good job of backing up all your years’ worth of data. However, you do not create bootable backups with Time Machine. Drive Cloning is a reliable alternative to backups and helps minimizing downtime caused by data disasters.
Monitor Health of the Hard Drive
In order to reduce the likelihood of failures, you should constantly monitor the health of your OS X drive. Following a proactive approach can save you from losing gigabytes of data stored in your system. You can use ‘SMART’ to check the current status of your drive at any given point.
Verify and Repair Directory
Corruption may occur to the directory of your OS X startup disk due to unexpected power spikes, hardware failures, and other system glitches. It is better off verifying and repairing this directory in the first place than to face system problems and data loss later. Disk Utility enables you to verify and repair OS X volumes. To run Disk Utility against the startup disk, you should boot from your Mac OS X Install CD.
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Defragment Your Hard Drive
Despite having adequate safeguards for handling performance issues, OS X drives tend to slow down after a certain period of use. This results from fragmentation of files and metadata on the hard drive. In the worst-case scenario, fragmentation mat cause directory corruption. To overcome these problems, you should periodically defragment your Mac hard drive.
Perform Disk Cleanup
Nothing annoys you more than the depleting free space on your OS X drive. This happens with the accumulation of large files, duplicates, caches, logs, and universal binaries on the drive. Further, if you have unused applications installed on your Mac, they would only add to your performance woes. To have your Mac running at its best, you should perform routine disk cleanups.
Tidy Your Desktop
Oftentimes, this is completely overlooked by the users. If you bother to tidy your Mac desktop regularly by cleaning out all the unused icons or application shortcuts, then you may get dramatic improvement in your system performance.
Nowadays, you may get all these benefits from a single software package known as Drive Toolbox for Mac. These software also possess a range of other capabilities, including partition management, wiping, drive initialization, surface scan, raw data editing, and more.
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