6. Things You Might Never Need to Do

Careful readers may have noticed that I omitted two common tasks from my recommendations of periodic maintenance procedures: repairing permissions and defragmenting your hard disk. Read this chapter to discover why you might never need to do these things—or whether you’re one of the few people who should.

Repair Permissions

If you visit Mac discussion forums, blogs, and news sites, you’ve probably seen repeated recommendations to use Disk Utility’s Repair Permissions feature. Some people recommend repairing permissions on a daily basis, or before and after every software installation, or as a first troubleshooting step when any sort of problem arises. Anecdotes abound about the seemingly magical curative (or ...

Get Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.