Chapter 21: Keep Your Mac in Tip-Top Shape

How to…

• Keep Mac OS X and your applications up-to-date

• Use Disk Utility

• Choose disk maintenance software

• Back up your files

A computer is like a car—it needs to be maintained to run smoothly. You change the oil in your car, check your tire pressure, and refill its fluids regularly, and to make sure your computer works correctly, you need to do similar actions. Fortunately, Mac OS X is built on a proven Unix foundation, providing the most stable operating system available in a personal computer. Nevertheless, both software and hardware glitches can occur, causing problems with your Mac.

There are two ways to maintain your Mac: the first is to make sure your operating system is always up-to-date. Apple regularly issues updates and bug fixes for Mac OS X and its applications, and it’s easy to do this: the operating system has a built-in software update function that can check automatically, at regular intervals, to see if there are any new updates available.

The second thing you should do is to carry out certain maintenance routines, and make sure your data is backed up, just in case. There are several tools designed to check and repair problems with your hard disk, which is the most fragile component of your computer, and there are many programs that help you back up your files for protection.

In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to update your software—bothMac OS X and your applications. I’ll explain some of Apple’s utility software included with Mac OS X, and discuss the most common problems that may plague your hardware. I’ll also tell you how to back up your files, just in case something happens and you lose data.