SUDO daily, weekly, monthly tests?

Have taken my g4 tower to Apple genius/hardware, on the advice of my EE/pc brother who was here and he pried from them how to force start the ?SUDO? periodic, daily, weekly, monthly tests. He was really worried about what he thought was; my disk defragmentation regarding possibly problems I am currently facing.

What does anyone know about this?

That series of tests only seems to happen while the Apple is on in whatever wee hours of their, Apple?s morning, when my Apple is probably not on, maybe has never has been on for 4 years, because I only use it when I am editing. Have been editing late though.

Haven?t gotten too far into reusing it in editing, as I am still trying to clean it up per LAFCPUG?s advice, but it really appears now to bring up the sluggish FCP files a whole lot quicker now in re-checking some saved edited stuff.

What should I know about more of this?

Was never aware this test even existed, and does Apple expect everyone to leave computers on over night to do disk and computer maintenance and then not tell me to leave it on?

They also mentioned Prosoft Drive Genius, (bro was impressed w/this) and Data Restore II and said Disk Warrior has destroyed stuff, who to believe here?

sudo periodic daily [enter]

These three (daily, weekly, monthly) are scheduled to run at around 3AM assuming your machine isn't sleeping or off. You can force all three of them in the above format. At least one of them will ask you for your password because it needs to change system files.

"sudo" means Super User Do, or perform this action as if you were "root" or the God user.

I don't think any of them does a defrag, but they do "neaten up" temporary files and take care of other trash that gets generated as the machine is used. If you haven't done any of these in years, the cleaning can take several hours.

Don't forget starting the machine from the install CD and run First Aid--Repair Permissions, and Verify Disk. That and periodic are the whole suite of tools.

UNIX/OS-X is pretty good about degragmenting by itself. It's one of the reasons that filling up a hard drive will make the machine bug-nuts crazy. OSX likes to constantly manage itself and it can't do that when one of the drives is full.

Koz

There are several good free applications you can get to run these tests whenever you like. One is MacJanitor : [www.versiontracker.com], another good, but slightly more complex one is Onyx : [www.versiontracker.com]

Also, you should repair your permissions periodically. Go to Applicatons > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select your hard drive in the left hand panel, then click on the First Aid tab. Then click 'Repair Permissions'.

Most Mac OS X versions (Unix base, as Koz points out) defragment themselves, to a pretty good degree.

You can also run Diskwarrior now and again just to make sure your directories are in good order.

But then again, I have met machines that are several years old that have never had a moment's repair, and they needed only minor adjustments when I went over them, so don't panic too much about this stuff.

<<<Go to Applicatons > Utilities > Disk Utility. >>>

This is where we part company a smidge. If you do the First Aid tests while the normal system is running, the system files running at that instant will not get checked. Better to run the machine from the install CD and point the test to the now completely available System Drive.

Minor point.

Koz