MacMini Clean-uo, defrag question

R

rzipser

Registered
Hi Anyone,

I have a mac Mini with 60 g hard drive, 25 g free. I know that's plenty free, but is there an easy way to clean up junk files, if any, defrag the hard drive, and get rid of temp files? I can do this on my PC, and I have used Utilities on the Mac to clean files. Any other suggestions?
 
While Mac OS X pretty much dynamically defrags the drive (so there's no need to manually do it), you can use tools like OnyX or Yasu to clean up any junk files and optimize your Mac OS.

If by chance you feel the need to do it manually, there's also iDefrag.
 
Word of warning: Back up your data before defragmenting. I used iDefrag once, and spent the next two days recovering my data. I backed up my really important files, but I decided to chance it with the replaceable things. Even though I could replace them, it was still a great big pain.

Since then, when I've felt the need to defragment, I simply back up everything, erase my entire drive, and copy the data back. It does basically the same job, and since I need to back up everything anyway, it's not much more trouble.
 
I second the motion to never defrag a Mac OS X system/boot drive. There just simply isn't a need to do so, and, even if you do, over time, Mac OS X is going to move the files around back to where it thinks they belong anyway.

By defragging a Mac OS X boot drive, you're quite possibly degrading the performance of the system. While Windows almost requires a defrag every once in a while, Mac OS X uses a completely different, and more advanced, filesystem that does not need to ever be defragmented.
 
The big exception to that rule is when you're dealing with large files, like video, or if you're low on disk space. When fragmentation is really degrading performance with video, it is painfully obvious, so if you're not sure that fragmentation is a problem, it's most likely not.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top