Any Good Progs To Optimize Osx?, stuff like norton/disk warrior.... Options

[SupaSandeep]

hi im new to the board i was wonder which program you guys reccomend for defraggin/ optimizing performance... i hear disk warrior is good, i have a couple friends who sed norton messed up their systems... please help!
also are there any free apps that defrag??

[lepetitmartien]

First OS X defrags itself (files up to 20 or 30 MB I don't remember).
Second use Techtools but be wary, some have had troubles after the operation (to be confirmed: it's supposed to be safe now).

Don't approach Norton even in dreams !

In fact for you system, clone it, and store it safely, for other drives partitions, save the files elsewhere (time to back up) and reformat the partiton, that way, it'll be clean and sure and it cost you the back up time and support.

For the cloning, use either the Apple disk utility, or Xupport, a little shareware which among things can clone specified parts of you drives.

[bjkiwi]

I use techtool pro for optimizing and maintenance on my system and audio drives and it works great, no problems. Highly recommend it.

G4 DP1.25 / panther

bjkiwi

[Nels]

This will do the job nicely and it's free... I use it on my Alum G4 1.25 Powerbook, running Mac OS x / 10.3.5 and on our G5 as well.

http://www.download.com/MacJanitor/3000-22...4-10227094.html

[SupaSandeep]

thanks guys, that mac janitor is pretty cool, its kinda like this other prog i found called cocktail....... another question though, whats this "daily, weekly, monthly" stuff about?? are those tasks that osx runs anyways and u just speed up the process with these progs?? thanks again for the help

[lepetitmartien]

Macjanitor runs the BSD subsystem I was talking about. With the same limits, save you can run the optimization anytime you want.

[Zoolok]

Don't approach Norton even in dreams !

I second that! Early Norton was fine; expensive updates and trashed systems are stopping it being as useful (allegedly!)

Disk Warrior is good at its job. I run it periodically to check things out; Onyx is also a good "housekeeper", along the lines of cocktail etc - and free!

[Dave Bourke]

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly are essential housekeeping tasks performed automatically by Unix. Unix assumes that your machine is turned on and running 24/7 so these tasks are scheduled by cron for between 3.00 and 5.00 in the morning.

However, most Mac users either turn their machines off or sleep them, so these tasks are never run on such machines. As a result, log files and databases will either grow to be huge or won't get backed up.

The tasks can be run at any time from within Terminal, but because most Mac users are not comfortable with command-line user interfaces, Brian Hill designed a graphic user interface for the routine – MacJanitor.

It is important to state that MacJanitor does NOT optimise disks in any way. If you want to do this, TechTool Pro 4 is the only way to go. Avoid Norton like the plague.

DiskWarrior 3 will not optimise disks – it does just one very important thing, and does it extremely well: it optimises and repairs your directory structure. If you're serious about the health and safety of your data, DiskWarrior 3 and TechTool Pro 4 are essential.

Onyx does just about everything that Cocktail does – but it's free (it will also perform the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly routines that MacJanitor does).

For cloning drives, absolutely nothing (not even the Apple Disk Utility) beats Carbon Copy Cloner – it's also free.

To summarise, the only utilities you need for OS X disk and system maintenance and backup are DiskWarrior 3, TechTool Pro 4, Onyx, and Carbon Copy Cloner. Two out of these four are free, the other two are very reasonable in price, considering they can save your ass. Look at it like this: what is your time and inspiration/perspiration worth to you?

Kind regards.

Dave Bourke

[Jay Nuno]

Great explanation Dave...!
Thanks very much!

[coldharbour]

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly are essential housekeeping tasks performed automatically by Unix. Unix assumes that your machine is turned on and running 24/7 so these tasks are scheduled by cron for between 3.00 and 5.00 in the morning.

If I've understood correctly things have changed a bit in Tiger, with Launchd?

Do you have info on if the cronscripts are still needed, or if Launchd will take care of them, and should the user manually run Launchd at some points in time like the crons?