Where to Start

It's easiest to start by deciding what you need to do and how often to do it. Keeping it simple is a good idea, too: The more difficult and involved your maintenance plan, the less likely you are to follow it. My routine is really easy: On the first Monday of the month, I repair permissions and clear my log and cache files. Don't worry if you have no clue what that means. I'll explain how to do both shortly. Let's first take a look at some of the tools that can help you with your maintenance chores.

Why You Don't Rebuild the Desktop Anymore

Before Mac OS X, rebuilding the Desktop was one of the most common maintenance and troubleshooting actions everyone used. Mac OS 9 and earlier had an invisible Desktop database that held information about the files on your hard drive. Weird things would happen if the database became corrupted. Most often, applications and documents suddenly had wrong or generic icons, or your Mac would act sluggish. Mac OS X tracks files in a different way, so we don't need to worry about rebuilding the Desktop anymore. As a matter of fact, the keyboard command for rebuilding the Desktop during startup, Command-Option, doesn't do anything when Mac OS X is booting.

Apple's Disk Utility Tool

Apple's Disk Utility is a jack-of-all-trades application that helps you burn CDs and DVDs, format and erase hard drives, and repair some disk-related problems. To learn how to use the different functions in Disk Utility, check out Chapter 8, "Tools."

Tip

The only drive on which you can repair permissions is your startup volume, meaning the disk that your Mac uses to load your operating system when you first turn it on.

Repairing Permissions

Mac OS X, just like Unix, is a multiuser operating system, which means that you can have more than one user account on your Mac. Each user sees the Mac as if it were his or her own personal machine, with his or her own Desktop, documents folder, music, and sometimes even applications.

One of Mac OS X's many responsibilities is to make sure that everyone has access only to the things they should, and nothing else. In other words, Tiger keeps track of who has permission to install and use applications, and who gets to see or use files depending on where they are stored.

Mac OS X knows what you should have access to without requiring you to create any special settings yourself. Some application installers and updaters, however, change these permissions, so you may suddenly find that you can't do something you've always done before, such as print or use a CD. Repairing permissions usually takes care of the problem.

1.	Start by launching Disk Utility. Choose Applications > Utilities.
2.	The column on the left shows every disk that you are using. It shows hard drives, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and even your iPod. Click the name of the hard drive that has Mac OS X installed on it. Unless you have other hard drives connected through FireWire or USB, or you have more than one internal drive, there should be only one listed.
3.	Now click the First Aid tab, and in the First Aid pane click the Repair Disk Permissions button. If the Repair Disk Permissions button is dimmed, you selected the wrong drive.
4.	Once Disk Utility is done repairing your permissions, it will indicate "Permissions Repair Complete." That's all there is to it.

It's OK to keep working while Disk Utility repairs your permissions. The only tasks you can't do while it's working are installing or removing applications, or installing application and system updates.

Monitoring Your Hard Drive's Status

The hard drive in your Mac has a technology built into it called Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, or SMART. SMART is like an early-alert monitoring system for your drive. It monitors the drive's health and can alert you if it is going to fail. The problem is that Tiger won't let you know that your drive is failing unless you go and check.

To check the SMART status of your hard drive, you use Disk Utility. First, launch the application by choosing Applications > Utilities. The column on the left lists all of the drives that are connected to your Mac. When you find your drive's name in the list, click the description of your drive that's just above its name (Figure 9.1). If the SMART Status item at the bottom of the windows says "Verified," your drive is fine. If it says anything else, it's time for a new drive.

Figure 9.1. Apple's Disk Utility application can tell you the SMART status of your internal hard drives. If you see anything other than "Verified," it's time to get worried.

Optimizing Your Hard Drive

Prior to Mac OS X, we periodically had to defragment, or optimize, our hard drives. The problem was that larger files would get broken into smaller chunks, or fragments, that were scattered all over your drive. The more chunks a file was broken into, the longer it would take to find and read all of the pieces, making your Mac seem slower. Defragmenting your drive took all of those fragments and put them back together so that they would load faster when you wanted to use or edit them.

With the advent of Mac OS X, the need to optimize your hard drive was eliminated. Mac OS X is far more efficient at saving and reading files, so the speed loss that comes from fragmented files isn't as much of an issue. Once Mac OS X v10.3 Panther was released, it was even less of an issue. Both Mac OS X v10.3 and v10.4 automatically optimize files as you use them, so you don't have to worry about finding a utility to do it for you.

To take this one step further: Don't use disk-optimization tools in Mac OS X. The likelihood that they will damage files or your operating system isn't worth the risk.

If you use an extra hard drive with Adobe Photoshop, Apple Final Cut Proor Logic, or some other application that benefits from having its own drive for a scratch disk, for rendering large data files, or for streaming large amounts of data, reformat the drive between projects. You will get better performance from the drive compared with what you would get by optimizing.

SMARTReporter

Disk Utility lets you know the current SMART status of your drive, but you have to remember to launch the application and check for yourself. I prefer to use SMARTReporter, by A. Julian Mayer (http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer; freeware). It adds an icon to your menu bar that always lets you know whether your drive is OK (Figure 9.2). SMARTReporter checks the SMART status of your drive every hour and alerts you if there is a problem.

Figure 9.2. SMARTReporter checks the SMART status of your internal hard drive every hour. A green icon means it's fine; a red icon means it's going to fail.

You can tell SMARTReporter to display an alert dialog, run an application, and send out an e-mail if your drive is going to fail. Displaying an alert does nothing more than that. You can use the "Execute application" option, however, to launch your data-backup application so that you can do a quick backup of your important information.

The "Send an e-mail to" option (Figure 9.3) can take care of notifying your Mac consultant or IT department of your pending drive failure for you. Here's how to set it up:

Figure 9.3. SMARTReporter can send an e-mail message to alert you and anyone else you choose that your hard drive is failing.

1.	Check the "Send an e-mail to" box.
2.	Add your consultant's or IT department's e-mail address in the field on the bottom-right.
3.	If you use Apple's Mail application, you're done. If not, click the Configure Mail button.
4.	In the E-Mail Settings dialog that opens, click the "Send using custom settings" radio button (Figure 9.4). Figure 9.4. If you aren't using Apple's Mail application to send and receive e-mail, you need to add your outgoing e-mail settings to the E-Mail Settings dialog. After you do, click the Send button to send a test e-mail to verify that you entered the correct settings.
5.	Enter your e-mail address in the "E-mail address" field.
6.	Enter your outgoing e-mail server settings in the SMTP-Server section. You can check your e-mail application's account settings for the information. If your consultant or IT department set up your e-mail application for you, ask them for help.
7.	Click the Send button to test your custom e-mail settings. A test message will be sent to the address you entered after checking the "Send an E-mail to" box.

Since Apple has not enabled SMART monitoring for FireWire hard drives, it only works with your Mac's internal drive.

Clearing Log and Cache Files

Unix creates logs that track your Mac's activities, including what applications are launched and when, what type of information is coming to or being sent from your Mac through your network, and when your Mac is turned on or shut down. If these log files aren't periodically cleaned out, your Mac's performance level may drop off, and your system won't run as smoothly.

Unfortunately, these logs and related cache files probably aren't being cleared because Unix maintenance tasks tend to run between 3 and 5 in the morning, when your Mac is either shut off or asleep. Luckily, several generous Mac-software developers have stepped in and written simple applications that run the tasks and save you from the Unix command line at the same time. My favorite is MacJanitor.

MacJanitor

MacJanitor (http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html; freeware), by Brian Hill, is a free utility that has only one job: It runs the daily, weekly, and monthly Unix maintenance routines for you (Figure 9.5). It clears system log files that otherwise can get bloated or corrupted. Here's how to use MacJanitor:

1.	Launch MacJanitor, and then click the padlock icon and enter your administrator password if asked for it.
2.	Click the All Tasks button. When MacJanitor is finished, it will beep.

Figure 9.5. MacJanitor clears bloated log files and can give you back hard-drive space that Mac OS X was using for old logs that haven't been purged.

Feel free to run MacJanitor as often as you like. I tend to use it every couple of weeks, or if my Power Book seems slower than usual. Be sure to use version 1.3 or later.

Tweak Freak

Another useful tool is Tweak Freak (http://home.comcast.net/~jeff.ulicny/software/utils.html; freeware). Tweak Freak is a utility that does the same things as MacJanitor, and then some. In addition to clearing the system log files, it can also clear your system cache files, Web-browser cache, font cache, and mail cache; repair permissions; force-empty the Trash when you have files that won't delete; and more.

Here's how to clear your system log files:

1.	Launch Tweak Freak, and then click the Unix tab (Figure 9.6). Figure 9.6. Tweak Freak's Unix pane includes MacJanitor's maintenance routines.
2.	Check the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Maintenance boxes.
3.	Click the Perform Maintenance Tasks button.

Sometimes your font cache can become corrupted, and cause applications like Adobe InDesign to crash or launch. Clearing your font cache can fix the problem. To learn more about working with the fonts on your Mac, check out Chapter 2, "Fonts." Here's how to clear your font cache:

1.	Launch Tweak Freak, and then click the Cleaning tab (Figure 9.7). Figure 9.7. You can use Tweak Freak's Cleaning pane to clear out your operating system's font cache if applications like InDesign start randomly crashing. Be sure to restart your Mac after clearing the cache.
2.	Check the Font Cache box.
3.	Click the Clear Selected button.
4.	Enter your administrator password in the dialog that opens, and click OK.
5.	Click the Clear Selected button again.
6.	Restart your Mac.

If you have files in the Trash that simply won't go away, Tweak Freak will force the items to delete for you. Here's how:

1.	Launch Tweak Freak, and then click the Finder tab.
2.	Click the Force Empty Trash button.
3.	Enter your administrator password in the dialog that opens, and then click OK.
4.	Click the Force Empty Trash button again.

Be sure to use version 2.1 of Tweak Freak or later.

Third-Party Tools

Sometimes routine maintenance isn't enough to keep your Mac running like it should. If applications are quitting when they shouldn't, or, even worse, if Tiger crashes, it may be time for a serious disk-repair utility. I always have Alsoft's DiskWarrior handy. DiskWarrior analyzes and rebuilds yourhard-drive directory structure if it finds any problems, and it has even returned hard drives to a bootable state for me when my Mac couldn't find the drive's System folder.

Another utility, Prosoft's Drive Genius, repairs system directory damage and also performs other diagnostic tasks. It can check to see if your hard drive is failing, run benchmark tests to see what level of performance you are getting from your Mac, and more.

Keep in mind that these applications will not help you if your hard drive physically fails to operate. If that happens, you'd better have your important data backed up. If you don't have a backup strategy in place, be sure to read the "Backing Up" section, later in this chapter.

DiskWarrior

Alsoft's DiskWarrior (www.alsoft.com; $79.95) may be a one-trick pony, but it sure does its trick well. This utility repairs disk directory damage and in many cases can repair drives that other utilities can't. It's my first line of defense when a Mac starts acting unreliably. Typical symptoms range from unusually slow performance to applications constantly crashing or failing to launch, to situations where a Mac won't boot to the Desktop after it's turned on.

Hard-Drive Failure: The Sound of Trouble

One of the worst things that can happen to a designer, or to any professional computer user for that matter, is the physical failure of a hard drive. Along with the drive, all of your critical data is lost. And the salt inthe wound is calling your clients to explain why their projects will be late. You are backing up, right?

Just like your car, a hard drive makes clunking and scraping sounds when something is wrong. Unlike your car, a hard drive with mechanical problems can't be fixed. If your hard drive is making scraping sounds or clunking sounds, or it sounds as if it is speeding up and slowing down every second or two and clicking at the same time, your drive is on borrowed time. Back up your data to CD, DVD, or another hard drive right away, and replace your drive. It could stop working and take all of your data with it at any time.

If you don't own a copy of DiskWarrior, buy one today. Your Mac consultant keeps a copy handy, and you should, too. Downtime is not a luxury that designers can afford when there's a deadline looming. Besides, if you still have a problem after using DiskWarrior, you can feel comfortable knowing you are calling your consultant or IT department to help with a problem that's likely beyond your knowledge level.

Using DiskWarrior is a fairly straightforward process. Before you start, however, make sure that you are using version 3.0.3 or later. Earlier versions are not compatible with Tiger. The version number should be on the packaging and CD.

1.	Place the DiskWarrior CD in your CD drive, and then restart your Mac.
2.	When you hear your Mac's startup chime, press and hold down the C key. This forces your Mac to boot from the CD instead of the hard drive.
3.	Once you see the DiskWarrior splash screen, release the C key.
4.	DiskWarrior displays a window containing a license agreement that you have to accept before repairing your drive. If you don't agree, the process will stop, and you won't be able to repair your drive.
5.	Once DiskWarrior finishes loading, choose your drive from the pop-up menu (Figure 9.8). If you have only one disk drive connected, it will already be selected. Figure 9.8. Choose the disk you want to repair from the pop-up menu. You can't repair the DiskWarrior CD, as it's the disk you booted from.
6.	Click the Rebuild button to start analyzing your drive directory.
7.	Once DiskWarrior finishes analyzing your drive, it reports back with any errors it finds. Click the Replace button to replace your damaged drive directory with a new, repaired version.
8.	Quit DiskWarrior to restart your Mac.

Drive Genius

Prosoft Engineering's Drive Genius (www.prosofteng.com; $99) contains tools designed to check the integrity of your Mac's hardware and operating system. It includes several components to help you diagnose and repair system-related problems, benchmark your Mac's performance level, initialize and repartition hard drives, delete files so that they are unrecoverable, and duplicate drives and data.

Tip

Drive Genius isn't the only application that formats, initializes, and partitions hard drives. Apple's Disk Utility, discussed in Chapter 8, is a kind of Swiss army knife of hard-drive utilities.

Drive Genius is a nice complementary tool to DiskWarrior. It's relatively inexpensive, and you'll find it in many Mac consultants' arsenals. Since Drive Genius does its job in a different fashion than DiskWarrior, you should be able to repair most any directory-related problems using either of the two utilities.

Drive Genius is pretty easy to use, too. You will need to have version 1.2 or later for Tiger compatibility. You can find the version number on the CD.

1.	Place the Drive Genius CD in your CD drive, and then restart your Mac.
2.	When you hear your Mac's startup chime, press and hold down the C key. This forces your Mac to boot from the CD instead of the hard drive.
3.	Once you see the Drive Genius splash screen, release the C key.
4.	When Drive Genius displays its license agreement window, agree to continue, or cancel to abandon the repair process.
5.	After Drive Genius finishes loading, choose your hard drive from the list on the left side of the window (Figure 9.9). Figure 9.9. Drive Genius takes a different approach to repairing adamaged disk directory than DiskWarrior, and offers more tools for you to use.
6.	Click the Repair button at the bottom left to open the Repair window(Figure 9.10). Figure 9.10. Choose the drive you want to repair from the Drive Genius Repair window, and then click the Start button. Remember, you can't repair the drive you are currently booted from.
7.	Choose Repair from the pop-up menu, and then click the Start button.
8.	After Drive Genius finishes repairing your drive directory, quit the application to restart your Mac.

Keep in mind that these applications help you repair directory-related problems on your hard drive. They can't help you if the drive itself fails.

You are most likely to use Drive Genius's Repair function more than any other. If you want to use drive format or partition tools, click the Device button to see them (Figure 9.11). Initialize deletes all of the data, applications, and your operating system from your hard drive. Repartition lets you make your drive appear as if it is a collection of drives. If you have already partitioned your drive so that it looks like two, three, or more drives, you can also recombine all of the partitions so that it looks like you have only one drive again.

Figure 9.11. Click the Device button to show the Initialize and Repartition options in Drive Genius. Initialize will delete all of the information, including applications and Tiger, from the drive. Repartition will let you split a drive into multiple sections that your Mac sees as individual drives.

Drive Genius has a few other functions it performs as well. Let's take a quick look at what they are.

• Defragment. Defragment recombines documents that are saved in pieces across your hard drive back into single files (Figure 9.12). In theory, this should speed up your Mac, since it needs to look in only one place on your hard drive for a specific file. The reality, however, is that we don't really need to worry about defragmenting. For a detailed explanation, check out the sidebar "Optimizing Your Hard Drive," earlier in this chapter.

  Figure 9.12. Drive Genius includes a disk-defragmenting tool to recombine files that have been split into sections and scattered around your hard drive.

  

• Duplicate. Duplicating a drive makes an exact clone. You need to have an extra drive to use as a destination for the drive you want to copy (Figure 9.13). This is useful if you have a hard drive or CD with project files that you want to duplicate while preserving all of your InDesign or QuarkXPress document links. You can use the copy as a backup, or send it to a service bureau or printer for output.

  Figure 9.13. To make a duplicate copy of one hard drive to another, choose the drive you want to copy from Drive Genius's main window, and then select the drive you want to copy to from the Duplicate window.

  

• Sector Edit. Don't use the Sector Edit tool. This feature is for technicians who know exactly what they are doing. They can use this to recover missing and damaged files. You can use it to destroy everything on your hard drive.

• Shred. If you store proprietary or sensitive client projects on external hard drives, Shred lets you permanently erase the files so that they can't be recovered with other tools.

• Integrity Check. Integrity Check runs a series of diagnostics on your hard drive to make sure it's healthy. It shows you what type of speed you can expect from a drive when it is reading and writing data, and you can choose how long the test runs, ranging from one minute to one day. Unless you are familiar with expected data speeds for your drive, this tool may not be very useful. Your consultant or IT department, however, can use it to help locate problems.

• Benchtest. Benchtest compares the performance of your hard drive and Mac to known benchmark systems (Figure 9.14). You can use it to see how your Mac's data-transfer times stack up compared with similar systems.

  Figure 9.14. Benchtest compares the performance of your hard drives to known benchmarks. In this case, my iPod performs consistently more poorly than the built-in hard drive in a G4 iBook.

  

• Scan. The Scan utility checks a hard drive to see if there are any parts of it that can't be read from or written to. If you have a drive that doesn't seem to be able to hold as much information as you think it should, this is a good way to check for problems. If you have a 120 GB hard drive, but it holds noticeably less data, Scan can check to see if there are enough defects to account for the lower-than-advertised capacity. If you find any, replace the drive. Your client files are worth far more than the price of a new drive.

Antivirus Software

Currently, viruses and worms are primarily limited to the world of Microsoft Windows. Mac OS X is virus free and hopefully will stay that way for years to come. The reason all of the viruses you hear about on the news are limited to Windows is that a virus is nothing more than an applicationin this case, a malicious application.

Viruses, just like any other application, are developed to work in conjunction with a specific operating system and won't work on other computer platforms. For example, the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 will not run on a Mac. The same holds true for a computer virus. If it's written for the Windows operating system, it won't work on a Mac.

So far, Mac OS X users have been spared the blight of viruses that Microsoft Windows users suffer from every day. Lucky for us, Tiger is inherently more secure than its Windows counterpart, making it more difficult to target the Mac with malicious applications. Despite the fact that we are living in a safety zone today, that doesn't mean that no one will ever crack through and develop a real, working, and destructive Mac virus. It's a good idea to be aware of virus issues and do our best to protect our computers with antivirus software.

My Hard Drive Is Dead. What Now?

It's not a case of if a hard drive will fail; it's a case of when. Hard drives are mechanical, so they will eventually break down and fail to work. If you are unlucky enough to lose a hard drive with critical data that isn't backed up, you have two choices: re-create the lost data, or send your drive to a data-recovery company.

Neither option is particularly appealing, nor are they cheap. Deciding what to do is a matter of economics. If the files are worth more than the cost of recovering them, send the drive to a data-recovery specialist, but be prepared to spend between several hundred and several thousand dollars to get your data back.

DriveSavers has one of the best reputations in the data-recovery business. You can call the company at 1-800-440-1904.

And here's hoping you never have to call them.

Unfortunately, antivirus applications tend to slow down your Mac and get in the way when you are trying to work. So why worry about virus protection? Because you work with files that come from Windows users, and you pass files to other Windows users. If you receive a document that has a virus infection, and then pass the file on to another Windows user, the virus will travel with it, even though your Mac is unaffected.

Think of it this way: Your client, who uses Windows, sends you a file for a project you are working on. The file is infected, but the client doesn't know it. Your virus-protection software identifies the danger, cleans the file, and alerts you. You warn your client, become the hero, and earn a loyal customer.

Norton AntiVirus

For most users, Norton AntiVirus, from Symantec (www.symantec.com; $49.95), is probably the best option right now. Once installed, it is relatively unobtrusive and can auto-update its virus definitions. Virus definitions are the part of an antivirus application that keeps track of what the currently known viruses are, how they act, and what to look for when identifying them. Since new viruses are coming out all the time, and eventually one may target the Mac, the definitions database needs to be kept up to date as well; otherwise, one may slip by your defenses and get passed on to a client or other designer.

Norton AntiVirus can also check e-mail attachments, scan your hard drive at regular intervals, and check other hard drives and removable disks that you attach to your Mac. It has a reasonably easy-to-understand interface, gives you visual feedback and dialogs to let you know it's working, and can walk you through setting up a schedule for automatically installing the latest virus definitions and checking for infected files.

Norton AntiVirus requires an annual subscription to get the latest virus definitions. The subscription will cost you $15. Be sure that you are using Norton AntiVirus 10.1 or later for Tiger and Intel-based Mac compatibility.

ClamXav

ClamXav (www.markallan.co.uk/clamXav) is an open-source and free antivirus application (Figure 9.15) that's built on the ClamAV antivirus engine. The installer is easy to use, and it can auto-update its virus definitions, just like Norton AntiVirus. The interface isn't quite as easy to use, and you will get almost no feedback that it is even working. If you want your antivirus application to be more user friendly, and offer lots of feedback so that you know it is working, stick with Norton AntiVirus.

Figure 9.15. ClamXav may not have the friendliest of interfaces, but it is a reliable and unobtrusive virus protection application.

If you are comfortable that you have properly configured ClamXav, and it's no big deal that you aren't getting dialogs that pop up and tell you it's working, that can sometimes be a real bonus, since you won't get interrupted while you are working. On the other hand, if you aren't completely sure it is correctly set up, the lack of dialogs and alerts can be disturbing.

Where Norton AntiVirus gives you an easy-to-read activity log, ClamXav relies on Tiger's Console (Figure 9.16), which displays logs of all the activities on your Mac. If you know how to interpret the Console log, you can tell if ClamXav has been doing its job. Even though ClamXav relies on Console, which is used in part by technicians and consultants to diagnose the sources of system and application problems, it shows a bare-bones report of its activities that's not too hard to decipher.

Figure 9.16. ClamXav's activity log displays using Apple's Console application. The log shows you when the last scan was performed, how many files were checked, and how many were infected with viruses.

ClamXav's Preferences let you set an automatic schedule to check for viruses (Figure 9.17) and also schedule automatic virus-definition updates (Figure 9.18). Sometimes it doesn't show the schedule you created. If that happens, just click the Re-load Schedule Settings button to refresh the display. Your settings will reappear.

Figure 9.17. ClamXav's Schedule pane holds the controls for setting up a regular virus scanning schedule. You can set the time of day, and which days, the scan starts.

Figure 9.18. The Update pane lets you choose when ClamXav automatically checks for virus-definition updates.

Be sure to download the ClamXav + Backend Installer version 1.0.1 or later. It is a single installer that loads all of the necessary files on your Mac and walks you through the initial setup.