Chapter 24
In This Chapter
Cleaning unnecessary stuff off your hard drive
Backing up your data
Fixing permissions errors
Automating tasks in Mavericks
Updating OS X automatically
Nothing runs better than a well-oiled machine, and your iMac is no exception. (But please, don’t ever oil your iMac — that’s just a figure of speech.) In this chapter, I demonstrate how you can make good use of every byte of storage space provided by your hard drive.
With a little Mavericks maintenance, such as Time Machine (for backing up and restoring your hard drive) and frequent scans of your hard drive for permissions errors, you can ensure that your iMac is performing as efficiently as possible. Automator allows your iMac to perform tasks automatically that used to require your attention. In addition, configuring Software Update to run automatically can allow you to live life free and easy, watching your favorite reality TV and eating ice cream (or yogurt — your pick).
Criminy! Where does all this stuff come from? Suddenly that spacious 1TB hard drive has 19GB left, and you start feeling pinched.
Before you consider buying a new internal or external hard drive (which you can read about in Chapter 23), take the smart step: “Sweep” your hard drive clean of unnecessary and space-hogging software.
If you’re willing to dig into your data a little, there’s no reason to buy additional software to help you clean up your hard drive. All you really need is the willpower to announce, “I simply don’t need this particular item any longer.” (Sometimes that’s tougher than it might seem.)
Consider all the stuff that you probably don’t really need:
How hard is it to clean this stuff off your drive? Easier than you might think!
Removing an application or file from your hard drive usually takes two simple steps:
Truly, no big whoop.
Some applications install files in different locations across your hard drive. (Applications in this category include the Microsoft Office suite and Adobe Creative Suite and Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop.) How can you clear out these “orphan” files after you delete the application folder?
The process is a little more involved than deleting a single folder, but it’s still no big whoop. Here’s the procedure:
You can read more about Search and Finder windows in Chapter 7.
Figure 24-1 shows this search. I want to remove Toast Titanium, so I search for every file with the word toast in its name.
Be sure that the files you choose to delete are part of the deleted application. For example, a text file with the name Instructions on Making a Perfect Piece of Toast might not be part of Toast Titanium.
Many associated files either
Don’t empty the Trash immediately after you delete these files. Wait a few hours or a day. That way, if you realize that you deleted a file that you truly need, you can easily restore it from the Trash.
If you’d rather use a commercial application to help you clean up your hard drive, a number of them are available, but most are shareware applications that perform only one task. For example, Tidy Up 3 from Hyperbolic Software (www.hyperbolicsoftware.com) does one thing, but it does it well. It finds duplicate files on your hard drive, matching by criteria such as filename, size, content, and extension. It’s a good tool at $30.
For a truly comprehensive cleanup utility, I recommend CleanMyMac 2, from MacPaw (macpaw.com). Not much crud squeaks by all those search routines, including duplicates, orphan preference files, and log files. You can even remove unneeded language files to free space on your drive! CleanMyMac 2 sells for about $40.
Do it.
I’m not going to lecture you about backing up your hard drive … well, perhaps just for a moment. Imagine what it feels like to lose everything — names, numbers, letters, reports, presentations, saved games, photographs, and music. Then ask yourself, “Self, isn’t all that irreplaceable stuff worth just a couple of hours every month?”
Time for a Mark’s Maxim:
Take my word for it — you will thank me some day!
You can back up your files either by saving them to external media or by using the awesome Time Machine feature included with Mavericks.
The simplest method of backing up files is simply to copy the files and folders to an external hard drive or a CD or DVD. Nothing fancy — in fact, I call this procedure the “quick-and-dirty backup” — but it works.
If you have an external hard drive on your iMac, you can easily drag backup files to it from your internal hard drive (I cover external hard drives in Chapter 23):
You can burn backup files to a recordable CD or DVD, if you have an internal or external optical drive.
To use the Finder’s Burn feature to create a backup CD or DVD, follow these steps:
If you’re using the default settings in the CDs & DVDs pane in System Preferences, a dialog appears, asking you to choose an action.
An icon named Untitled DVD appears on your Desktop. Double-click the icon to open a Finder window.
They can be organized any way you like. Don’t forget that the total amount of data shouldn’t exceed 4GB or so (on a standard recordable DVD) or 8GB (on a dual-layer recordable DVD). You can see how much free space remains on the disc at the bottom of the disc’s Finder window.
You can also click the Burn button on the Recordable DVD bar, which appears at the top of the disc’s Finder window.
If you’ve invested in Toast Titanium from Roxio (www.roxio.com) or another CD/DVD recording application, you can create a new disc layout to burn your backup disc. (Think of a layout as a “road map” indicating which files and folders Toast should store on the backup.)
If you enable backups via the OS X Time Machine feature, you can literally move backward through the contents of your iMac’s hard drive, selecting and restoring all sorts of data. Files and folders are ridiculously easy to restore — and I mean easier than any restore you’ve ever performed, no matter what the operating system or backup program. Time Machine can even handle such deleted items as Contracts entries! To sum it up, Time Machine should be an important and integral part of every Mac owner’s existence.
Here’s how you can turn back time, step by step, to restore a file that you deleted or replaced in a folder:
The oh-so-ultra-cool Time Machine background appears behind your folder, complete with its own set of buttons at the bottom of the screen (as shown in Figure 24-2). On the right, you see a timeline that corresponds to the different days and months included in the backups that Mavericks has made.
Alternatively, use the Forward and Back arrows at the right to move through the folder’s contents through time. (You should see the faces of Windows users when you “riffle” through your folders to locate something you deleted several weeks ago!)
The backup date of the items you’re viewing appears in the button bar at the bottom of the screen.
Time Machine returns you to the Finder, with the newly restored file now appearing in the folder. Out-standing!
For simple backup and restore protection, Time Machine is all that a typical Mac owner at home is likely to ever need. Therefore, a very easy Mark’s Maxim to predict:
Shifty-eyed, sneaky, irritating little problems can bother your hard drive: permissions errors. Incorrect disk and file permissions can
To keep Mavericks running at its best, I recommend that you fix permissions errors at least once per week. Follow these steps:
From the keyboard, press +Shift+U to open the Utilities folder directly in a new Finder window.
Volume is just computer-speak for a named partition, like Macintosh HD, which appears under your physical hard drive.
Disk Utility does the rest and then displays a message about whatever it has to fix. (When will someone invent a car with a Repair Me button?)
Mavericks’s Automator application is a big hit among iMac power users. You use Automator (as shown in Figure 24-3) to create customized tools that automate repetitive tasks.
You can also create workflows, which are sequential (and repeatable) operations that are performed on the same files or data, and then your Automator application can automatically launch whatever applications are necessary to get the job done.
Here’s a great example: You work with a service bureau that sends you a CD every week with new product shots for your company’s marketing department. Unfortunately, these images are flat-out huge — taken with a 16-megapixel camera — and they’re always in the wrong orientation. Before you move them to the Marketing folder on your server, you have to use Preview to laboriously resize each image and rotate it, and then use the Finder window to save the smaller version.
With help from Automator, you can build a custom application that automatically reads each image in the folder, resizes it, rotates it, generates a thumbnail image, prints the image, and then moves the massaged images to the proper folder. Of course, you can run Automator from Launchpad. Currently, Automator can handle specific tasks within more than 80 applications (including the Finder), but both Apple and third-party developers are busy adding new Automator task support to all sorts of new and existing applications.
To create a simple application with Automator, launch the application and follow these steps:
Automator displays the actions available for the item you’ve selected. Some of these items are media files, whereas others include Contacts cards, files and folders in the Finder, PDF documents, and even Apple Mail messages.
Use sample files while you’re fine-tuning your application, lest you accidentally do something deleterious to an original (and irreplaceable) file!
Figure 24-4 illustrates a workflow that will take care of the earlier example — resizing and rotating a folder full of images and then moving them to the Pictures folder.
Your new Automator application icon appears, sporting an Automator robot standing on a document.
If you expect to use your new Automator application often, you can drag the application icon to your Dock or your Desktop.
If your Automator application should run every time you log in, follow these steps to set it up as a Login Item:
Now your Automator application is really automatic.
I prefer my iMac to take care of cleaning up after itself, so updating Mavericks should be automatic as well. In OS X Mavericks, operating system updates are performed by the Update feature built-in to the App Store application.
Software Update can be found in three convenient spots:
If you take the System Preferences route, you can set Mavericks to check for updates automatically:
Update covers every Apple application, so I usually check once daily just to make sure that I don’t miss anything.
If something needs to be updated, the program alerts you, either automatically downloading the update(s) or displaying a notification letting you know what you can update (depending on the settings you choose in the System Preferences App Store pane).
You can even check for updates immediately from the App Store System Preferences pane — click the Check Now button. That, dear reader, is just plain thoughtful design.