Mac OS regular maintenance?

[jim4pp]

I'm a freelance designer, so I have to be my own IT department. I am interested in what regular maintenance you do on your Mac work stations. I would like to know generally how often you repair permissions, etc.

Thanks for any input.
Jim

[DavidMa]

I repair permissions before and after any software install.

other than that, I don't do any "regular" maintenance.
I only do maintenance when needed, like if I need to clean font caches because i can't load fonts.

[doubting_thomas]

Other than what David posted, I run the Daily, Weekly, Monthly maint. scripts using Onyx when I think of it. I haven't really needed to use anything else with my MacPro.

[Cory Smith]

I usually don't do anything (no even permissions)..

the only regular thing I do is run Font FInagler, but that is usually because I can't get quark to load a font.

[adam]

Read these articles:

Software Update Tips and Voodoo
http://daringfireball.net/2004/12/software_update

Seriously, ‘Repair Permissions’ Is Voodoo
http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/re...issions_voodoo

I don't do anything special on my day to day system. On occasion I will reboot my system if I notice something isn't running as smooth. This is rather subjective, but I can usually tell when its time to reboot. I normally have 21+ days of uptime between reboots.

I've had OS X production boxes (web, file servers) that have been up for 200+ days without doing any special maintenance on them.

[Mike]

Make backups. That is it.

Automate it, do it every hour or two and store them offsite.

[adam]

Yeah, backups are important too. Automating backups makes it effortless. It's easy to forget to do it for a few days. [SuperDuper! |http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/] is a great utility to mange backups.


A service like Amazon S3 is a great solution for offsite backups.

[pmkprog]

I'll run applejack when things seem to be acting funny. That has been working real well for me.

[frailer]

After a nasty experience last year, I now use Cocktail. The shareware version for a nominal fee gives you a "console" of stuff you can fire up when you want, or schedule to run as well. Includes Permissions Repair as well as cache cleaning functions.

[Mike]

I stopped verifying permissions a long time ago. SuperDuper! has the option to repair permissions before it does the backup, but that was just an enormous waste of time when the scripts run.
bq. Even if you “verify” permissions and it shows some that don’t match, it doesn’t mean they’re +wrong+. They might be wrong, but they might just be different but still OK. [#|http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/repair_permissions_voodoo|Seriously, ‘Repair Permissions’ Is Voodoo]