[tweetmeme]This is the story of how my Macs have treated me, and how I treat them in return. I don’t intend to imply this is the case for every user out there, just what I’ve experienced over the past 5 years that I’ve used a Macintosh.

I started out with an iBook G4 in the year 2005. I actually had to coax my dad to get it, since I didn’t have any cash—but that’s a different story altogether. While I was a techno-geek for a long time before that, I was completely new to the Mac. I had never used any Macintosh before then. During that time the Mac was quite a mystery in India. I didn’t know a single person who had one, and most people related to Apple as “the iPod maker”—some still do. One of course heard war tales of the Mac, about how they never crashed, never had any problems, and how ‘it just works’.

One fine day, we saw the icon of a stop sign show up on startup. Puzzled as to how it’s even possible for a Mac to have an issue getting to the desktop, I took it to the Apple Store. The attendant casually brushed it off with a “must be some conflict”, invoked the target disk mode, copied data from the iBook to one of their machines, reinstalled Mac OS X Tiger on it, and reinstated all of the data. “See!”, I said to my dad, “I told you Macs are problem free”. My faith was restored. That of course wasn’t the last time I saw the stop sign, though. Soon after, the hard drive crashed. We lost a little data in that incident, although target disk mode was able to recover some of it.

I currently use a four year old iMac, the first of the Intels. It shipped with Tiger. So far I’ve had the SuperDrive replaced three times, Mighty Mouse replaced two times (which was literally beaten to its death after I got my Magic), and a keyboard. Have you noticed a pattern here? They’re all hardware related issues. That’s not to say I haven’t had software issues. Twice, I’ve faced kernel panic issues. The first time I got a panic every 1 hour 9 minutes 33 seconds; second was more random. Both times, it was due to a system update. The 10.5.7 system update in particular totally wrecked my system, after which I have been quite apprehensive about jumping on to new updates. The 10.4.10 update was also known to create havoc, upon which Apple soon released 10.4.10a.

My current install of OS X Snow Leopard has been running so since August 28th, the day Snow Leopard was released. I’ve put it through thousands of applications and hacks, yet, it runs as smoothly as a month after a reinstall. Yes, when one goes through a fresh install, everything is fast. That lasts for about a month or so, after which things plateau out. If you look at maintenance tasks, they can be broadly classified into two kinds, those that improve performance, and those that fix what could be broken.

I’ve reviewed a lot of maintenance apps in the past. And for most part, they all do something. Some of them will clean out your caches so you can start fresh, others will remove PowerPC code from your universal binaries, and some will do everything, and then some. From a technical perspective, a lot of them work, and you could notice some speed improvements once the tasks have been completed. From a real world usability perspective, it’s mostly psychological. I think it’s also some kind of post-traumatic behaviour of having your PC crash every few weeks, that it feels good doing something for your system. I certainly felt good while running a maintenance script, or clearing out the caches (which may not be all that good a thing). The end result however is a temporary feeling of snappiness arising out of a fresh cache, but the results don’t carry forward in actually using your Mac. These tasks don’t necessarily fix anything. To note, when I had those kernel panics was a time when I did run maintenance tasks.

As of right now, I have one major issue on my iMac. My iTunes doesn’t recognise iPhones. I know it’s this particular installation of OS X because the library reads fine on other Macs, and other installations of OS X. In an effort to make sure I’m not spreading false info, I ran maintenance tasks by MainMenu, Onyx, Drive Genius on a SuperDuper clone of my system. This took me quite a while to do all this, but I had make sure. The fixed clone didn’t show any improvements, and weirdly, I’m happy my point is proven rather than being sad about my broken iTunes.

While writing this article, I thought why not put defragmentation to the test as well. The last time I defragmented using Drive Genius I saw noticeable improvements; alas, no one believed me. Mac users don’t like to believe OS X can slow down, ever. “Macs don’t need defragmentation, as the OS defrags on its own; it doesn’t use shitty NTFS file system”. It’s like a geeky regurgitation of a Get a Mac ad.

So I got iDefrag from Coriolis Systems, which just got a major version upgrade to 2.0. It’s now Snow Leopard compatible, it feels fresh, and you don’t need a tedious boot disk to use it. iDefrag automatically creates its own startup disk (not sure about the specifics) and upon restart you’re presented with a simple window environment much like an OS X installation. Defragging my 250GB almost-full hard drive took about 3 hours. I don’t know for sure, since I ran it right before going to sleep. This time, instead of going by how it feels, I decided to keep some crude benchmarks. My iMac used to take 2 minute 5 seconds from cold start to opening a text file from the Documents folder using finder window. This includes starting up some extra apps and such [1. I have another, relatively fresh, installation of 10.6 on another partition, which booted within 58 seconds.]. After defragmentation, it completed the same task in 1 minute 04 seconds. Cold start to fully loaded SA was 2 minutes 35 seconds. 1 minute 26 seconds after a defrag. Aperture launched in 11 seconds before defrag; 5 seconds, after. Surprising changes a week later however. Cold start to opening file was 1 minute 21 seconds. Fully loaded SA was 1 minute 48 seconds. Aperture takes 7 seconds to launch. But you know the difference this made in me working with my Mac? Nil. I don’t hardly restart my Mac, so boot time improvements went to waste. I hardly notice the 3 seconds Aperture takes to load up while I’m fiddling around with my camera. I can write any faster, Photoshopping feels the same, and QuickSilver is just as quick at performing tasks. For most purpose, my iMac is still fast machine, and I’m never left scratching my head looking at spinning beachballs.

For what it’s worth, iDefrag 2.0 really is the only utility where the juice is worth the squeeze. Running it involves the click of a button (and the you go to sleep), after which certain things do feel snappier. And at $20, it comes in at a good price. But it’s not crucial to my productivity on my Mac, and I don’t see myself running iDefrag more than every 6 months or so.

If you do want to make sure your Mac is always healthy and peak performance, here’s some things you could do. Every three months or so, run a disk check in Disk Utility. This is the best way to keep a check on your file system and make sure everything is healthy. Universal binary code cleansers and language pack removers are a great way to initially save a good amount of data. Most of your applications ship as universal binaries, that is, they can run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. This results in a lot of duplicate code; code you don’t need. Your apps also ship with multiple languages, and I don’t speak French or German. Collectively this data will occupy 4-5 gigabytes of hard drive space, which you can quickly recover using some free tools. These are one time use apps, after which they lose purpose and meaning; I’d recommend the free and open source Monolingual. Sure you install new apps, but the space gains are hardly worth the trouble. Even here, unless you’re using a MacBook Air and are starved for space, you’re better off just ignoring those few gigabytes occupied. Removing that code doesn’t make your system noticeably faster, and you might even run the risk of crashing an app because of some conflict.

Third, if you’re really seeing a lot of beachballs, get a copy of iDefrag and run it ever 3-4 months for a minor performance boost. You won’t get this boost if you run the app more frequently than that. Also, whenever you put your system through an OS update, it automatically runs a lot of these optimization scripts. I might have not seen such improvements if I had updated my system to the recently released 10.6.3. And if you’re really interested in performance, get yourself a solid state disk and say hello to near-zero seek times.

Most importantly, keep a SuperDuper backup at hand. No matter how well you treat your disk, it will always run the risk of crashing down all at once. And SuperDuper makes it easy to restore your entire system. I use, and recommend using, SuperDuper before any major OS update, just in case something happens to my system. After that I make a backup whenever my system is appears healthy, every two months or so [2. A bonus feature of SuperDuper is that every time you restore a cloned backup, your data is automatically defragmented.]. Most of my current data is in the cloud, including notes, email, preferences, databases, and older stuff is archived on hard drives. I also have Time Machine running. I do feel like a lot of the backups I do are wasteful. I don’t need all this data saved in so many locations. Already, most of my data is in the cloud. But Time Machine is so silent a tool that I don’t even have to think about it.

In Short

If you’re a new Mac user, wondering how you need to maintain your Mac, you don’t. Just put your work forward, and your Mac will take care of itself. You don’t need to defragment your hard drive, you don’t need to run maintenance scripts, and you don’t need to clean out your universal binaries. I know that trying to maintain my system will show results in a benchmark, but I try not to think about these, and focus on my work instead. And this view is shared by every proficient Mac user I’ve asked.

You’re most welcome to voice any support or criticism to this view.