Scheduling Maintenance

Taken together, all of the maintenance tasks discussed in the preceding sections — backing up, virus checking, securing your system, repairing permissions, defragmentation of your drive, and periodic cleaning up — can help ensure that your Mac experience is relatively error and hassle free.

• Daily. You should turn on and shut down your Mac only once per day (at the beginning and end of your work day or Mac session), if you elect to do so at all. You can put your Mac to sleep, spin down the hard disk, and make other energy-saving settings in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences (see Chapter 13). The most wear and tear on your computer’s components occurs during startup and shutdown due to the power draw that those processes require. It is good to leave your computer on overnight once in a while as Mac OS X runs maintenance scripts late at night to tidy up after itself.

  You should also check your disk space levels — open the Macintosh HD icon and look at the status section of the window at the top (you may have to choose View Show Status Bar to make it visible) to make sure that you have disk space available. In a business setting, you may also want to back up on a daily basis or every other day.

• Weekly. Scan your computer with virus software if it’s not already designed to run in the background. If your machine is for personal use, you may want to back up on a weekly basis, according to the media rotation schedule you have devised.

• Monthly. Update your virus definitions if your virus software doesn’t do this for you automatically. Check for updates to Mac OS X at least once a month. If the Software Update pane of System Preferences isn’t set to update automatically, go to this pane at least once a month and click the Check Now button to initiate an update manually. In addition, every few months you should defragment your hard disk. Repair the permissions of your drive monthly, especially after an update to the Mac OS system has been applied.

• Every three to six months. Run a session from one of the Disk Utility packages mentioned earlier in this Chapter. Clean house — remove applications, preference files, and other software that you no longer need. If you are a light computer user, defragment your hard disk.