Keeping the disc Healthy.......

[olive070]

Well I'm in love with my first hackintosh---i7, 32 gb ram etc, and now even have win7 working great in bootcamp/parallels (it's on separate HD).

Still from time to time I'm compelled to do a hard reset, it's fast and no biggie-----except: I worry about corruption etc. I do have a drive mirrored in CCC, so I'm not too worried about backup, but I want to keep my main drive healthy.

What are the best practices to do so? Best utilities?

Please excuse my ignorance, and TY in advance

 

[potemkin]

Apple Disk utilities .....
Use it to verify disk and partition.
Repair permissions occasionally

 

[olive070]

Apple Disk utilities .....
Use it to verify disk and partition.
Repair permissions occasionally

TY very much for response

That's enough? Really?

Here's a recent quote from a long time mac guy and a good photographer

"Bifurcator wrote:
There's the .DS_Store in every single folder. When these go bad and they VERY often do there's a whole host of troubles it can cause - like not remembering the display states of folders or your desktop, or not displaying icons properly or at all.

There's .bom files for every single app install usually found in /Library/Receipts/. Each .bom file contains a list of files installed for an app by the installer along with the correct permissions for each and every file. These don't go bad so often but the actual permissions do and Apple seems unable or unwilling to scan those files and reset permissions as they should be according to the relative .bom files. They kinda try to do it with Apple software but nothing from them AFAIK will clean up your non-apple apps once the permissions get corrupted - and they do quite often!

There's ACLs (Access Control Lists) - when ACLs go bad you get problems like finder always asking you for your password even on folders and files it shouldn't - as just one example. ACLs go bad quite often! Lots and lots of troubles with them! Especially in later releases of OS X. They can just ruin a server installation!!

The "LaunchServices" DB is responsible for the link between documents of a given type and the application that gets executed. It also keeps a list of all installed and previously executed apps. You feed it everytime you open a new type of document and you modify it everytime you select a different default app to open a file or general file type with - in the "Get Info" panel. When it goes bad and it VERY often does, you start seeing duplicates in the "Open With" menus, you can get wrong or corrupt looking icons, it can keep associations with deleted applications, or simply execute the wrong app on a double click.

The DYLD (DYnamic LoDer) uses a sort of DB known as a shared cache in simpler terms, to load all the frameworks, dylibs, and bundles needed by a given application's process - system or other. This DB (shared catch) gets whacked all the time and can cause kernel panics on occasion! Mostly ****e just stops working tho. This DB gets rebuilt during Apple's "Monthly Scripts" execution which happens once a month blind to the end user.

There's the MEI which is an indices for all the mail and mail folders on your system. It gets messed up pretty often too and can cause all kinds of troubles with mail reading, display, and searching. If you only have tens of thousands of messages on your system it either doesn't corrupt often or the affects of the corruption aren't obvious. Using and managing hundreds of thousands of messages over multiple accounts however and the instability becomes both obvious and extremely annoying! In the worst cases you can lose whole message bases. I have!

There's a Help system DB that's responsible for connecting help lookups with the associated app. This goes corrupt a lot. When it goes you get messages stating "There is no help for this topic." when actually there is. Or you can get really really slow look-ups, and I've even seen system crashes from this. Don't ask me how tho... <shrug>

And this is just the short list of just one particular weakness in OS X which I thought was the most obvious to end users. I certainly haven't met anyone who hasn't experienced at least one of these problems. And they've not only been happening from the beginning but they've gotten progressively worse and worse with every release. To the casual user they're often little more than an annoyance. They can be a major headache for a workstation user depending on the machine to do actual job related work. And they can be critical in the survival or death of a server installation!"

Excuse the color, hehe.

Anyway these guys are ranting a bit and some think lion and ML were a step back---in stability? I'm not sure. They long for panther or one of the early versions anyway.

I'm just trying to come to grips with the issues and tactics.

First, any chance the disc utility will adversely effect the installation when repairing discs and permissions. Any secret settings or flags to know?

Second, what about cache cleaning and which are the best software alternatives to do it?

Please not trying to get into windows v mac at all---just want to learn more osx

 

[alpha90]

Can't offer much in response, as I am in a state of wondering myself.
CustoMacs are just different enough that I hesitate to employ the normal Mac solutions without some pre-confirmation of safety.
I do find Disk Utility to be helpful -- to the extent of its capabilities.

So now I ask a related question to yours, and I trust this query enhances and does not hijack your thread.

Is OnyX safe to use on a CustoMac? If safe, should any of its vast powers be avoided?
http://www.onyxmac.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx


thanks

 

[potemkin]

You have greatly expanded a simple question.
If you want more powerful tools check out Norton Utilities , Disk Warrior.
The AppStore,Macworld, and Cnet are good sources.
Onyx mentioned in previous post does many things.
Onyx has several cautions in its documentation.
Disk Tools is safe unless you interrupt it while running.

Vis a vis many of the things in the extended quote they apply to the OSX server.
I use web mail that eliminates one problem.
Missing icons get replaced eventually through self healing.
Improper uninstalls and installations cause this also.
Software developer are not created equal.
That is why many are not on AppStore.
They do not follow guidelines.
Big name commercial products have their own guidelines many times.

OS X does fsck and rebuilds caches on boot. ( cache cleaning) ( Checkout Kext Wizard)

Be aware if you want to do more than disk tools you will need commensurate knowledge.
"Danger Will Robinson"
Good sources are Apple User forum,Apple Developer site, Darwin, and Mach Kernel.

You seem to have a lot of Windows experience.
With Windows you do need a host of tools just to keep machine from blowing up on a daily basis.
This is not the case with a Mac or Hack. ( registry editor cleaner etc. , driver zombies )

You said you have backup. Be sure to check out Carbon Copy Clone or SuperDuper.
You should at minimum have a separate partition that runs,preferably a separate drive.

I have had a Mac since MacPlus. Although I am aware of some problems along the way I have never sat around worrying like the 'rant' posted. I am sure this person loved Clint Eastwood and the empty chair.
The rant brought up many topics each which would need a lengthy dedicated thread.

The emphasis at Tonymac is on installation and hardware, but there is an Infinite loop section to handle Apple and third party SW.

General techniques
Turn off auto updates.
Only use standalone downloads of updates.
Update only when necessary.
Wait on downloads until they have been run through the ringer at this site.
Ignore comments such as 'worked for me ...no problems' ( updates )
Look at comments such as ' this hosed my system it messed up X,Y, and Z. I fixed it by doing this ' ( updates )