Kia ora tatou:

Here, for you Mac users, is the wonderful advice Donald has sent me about keeping your Macs running sweetly.

BTW, the evangelist on the right is Steve Jobs. Mac fanboys genuflect to him daily. PC users may know of him….in the same way we may have heard of Knockemstiff, Ohio..but who wants to go there ? (LOL)

Make sure you have 25-30% free space on your primary hard drive, otherwise things can get flaky.

1-2 Gb free suits most people, and if this gets compromised the machine will warn the owner, by suggesting they free up some space, however many people don’t understand the message and ring me. Cultural language differences sort of cause this. I’ve seen disks with zero space free and the machine runs fine, but of course you can’t save anything. Despite it saying zero, memory management systems probably are still doing things like creating scratch disks or virtual memory, so may be this accounts for the continuing stability.

Invest in Disk Warrior

Bit of an overkill - you’d need to be an Apple Service center to ever get to need to use it very often. I used to own a copy, but most repair jobs [1 every ten days] are not of the nature to require it enough to keep up the investment.

Mac’s need defragging too.

It’s done automatically - exactly when I’m not sure and it’s certainly not obvious to the point I wondered for sometime if indeed it was happening.
The best thing an owner can do is run Disk Utility’s Repair Permissions. It lives in Applications/Utilities. This’ll make the machine run faster if any files or folders have their permissions muddled up.

Disk Utility has four tabs, and these are some of the useful things hidden in them, but first you have to select which disk in the column on the left. Here you’ll notice one drive is often indented, so think of the top representation as the hardware side and the lower indented one as the software [logical] side. If it’s a new disk not formatted as either Mac or Windows, there’ll only be the top one. If two it does not matter for most operations which you choose. I won’t go into detail as to just how to use each facility, Apple’s Help database on your disk [see top menu on the right] will do that, but instead just discuss concepts:

First Aid tab:

Select your drive then clicking Repair Permissions will tidy up the hundreds of thousands of files on your Mac and will ensure speedy operation of same. If you see thousands being fixed run it again within two weeks. If it’s still finding thousands start looking for some ill written, perhaps free software on your Mac - this is not easy! If it only finds a handful off permissions to fix then run it again after several months.

On the right you’ll see Verify Disk and Repair Disk. The latter will be greyed out if, on the left you’ve selected the disk the Mac is running from. A computer, like a human cannot do brain surgery on it’s own brain. Anyway select your hard disk that’s driving the show and click “Verify”. If results are in green all is good, but if it quits or shows an error message or displays results in red, your disk is need of repair, from either Disk Utility [use the CD that came with your Mac to boot from and use it's Disk Utility], or a third party software such as Disk Warrior. However in all instances make sure you have a valid backup before attempting repairs! Sometimes a repair attempt will make things worse, and often at this point more resources, both people and gear, will be needed, and is beyond, and dangerous for the casual user/owner. If you have a good backup and know how to Restore from it then you could proceed to the next Tabs to effect repairs by reformatting and reinstalling an operating system [this occasionally better than attempting repairs as you start afresh from a new disk surface]:

Erase tab:

… essentially means here you can reformat your hard drive, and not just to a Mac format, but to DOS [however if DOS is chosen Disk Utility then will not be much use as it's not designed to do First Aid on DOS format]. Use of erase will definitely do just this, but you’ll get a warning first.

Partition tab:

… gives more options as to how a disk can be reformatted. The Options button should be explored for DOS and esoteric Mac choices. Partitioning [the esoteric options can be applied to just one partition] though is “old school” now days, so don’t go there unless you have special needs. It was the only way to eek out useable space in the old days as large disks were coming on the market at a time when file system formatting could not utilise the increasing space efficiently, or some software would like to run processes in a different area to increase stability. They’re now more of a hassle that they’re worth. Better to have external separate drives.

RAID tab:

How to format two or more hard disks to behave as one, so if one fails mechanically, the other still functions. When you Save to a RAID, then data is written to all disks instantaneously. There are 3-4 ways to set up a RAID. The best are hardware driven more than software. This is the territory for servers usually, where downtime is not an option, and backups in real time [now!] are important. Also for high end video editing which heats up a disk, then it re-calibrates, and a frame is skipped, so if the RAID is set up correctly and assuming both disks don’t re-calibrates at the exact same instant [unlikely], one covers for the other, and sorts out what’s missing and fixes it.

Restore tab:

This can be very useful occasionally. The fine print on the window explains it well. What it does not mention is that in a Mac thousands of files that run the show are deliberately made invisible. This means that if you drag one disk to another hoping to copy all the files that run a machine for instance, it’ll fail and the new disk won’t boot up anything. Restores take hours. Also the third party donation ware Carbon Copy Cloner does this too, and can be scheduled to do backup work using this functionality [not always seen in other backup softwares].

Ok that’s the Tabs covered, lastly along the buttons at the top you’ll see mention of images. This can be handy to clone a CD or DVD onto your drive. See Apple’s Help on this.

Lastly for users wanting to build on this short tutorial, also research and become skilled in Target Disk Mode [Apple's Help] if you have more than one Mac, and both have Firewire Ports, and how to boot up a Mac from a CD/DVD, holding down the “C” key.

As anything to do with disks has a degree of risk, this information is given on the “all care and no responsibility” basis

Many thanks for that, Donald. Awesome!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under The environment, Thinking about Photography and Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.