Chapter 24

Tackling the Housekeeping

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).

Cleaning Unseemly Data Deposits

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.

Getting dirty (or, cleaning things the manual way)

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.)

Unnecessary files and unneeded folders

Consider all the stuff that you probably don’t really need:

• Game demos and shareware that you no longer play (or even remember)
• Movie trailers and other QuickTime video files that have long since passed into obscurity
• Temporary files that you created and promptly forgot
• Log files that chronicle application installations and errors
• StuffIt and Zip archives that you downloaded and no longer covet
• iTunes music, video, and movies that no longer appeal

How hard is it to clean this stuff off your drive? Easier than you might think!

• You can quickly delete files.
• You can remove items from your iTunes Library.
• You can get rid of most of the space taken by any application (often the whole application) by deleting its application folder that was created during the installation process.

Removing an application or file from your hard drive usually takes two simple steps:

1. Display the file or application folder in a Finder window.
2. Delete the file or folder with one of these steps:
   • Drag the icon to the Trash.
   • Select the icon and press +Delete.
   • Right-click the icon and choose Move to Trash.
   • Select the icon and click the Delete button on the Finder toolbar (if you added one).

Truly, no big whoop.

Mac owners like you and me can once again feel superior to the Windows folks because most OS X applications don’t need a separate, silly “uninstall” program (although some larger applications include one for convenience).

Don’t forget to actually empty the Trash, or you’ll wonder why you aren’t regaining any hard drive space. (Mavericks works hard to store the contents of the Trash until you manually delete it, just in case you want to undelete something.) To get rid of that stuff permanently and reclaim the space, do the following:

1. Click the Trash icon on the Dock and hold down the button — or right-click — until the pop-up menu appears.
2. Choose Empty Trash.

Associated files in other folders

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:

1. Click the Search text box in a Finder window.

   You can read more about Search and Finder windows in Chapter 7.

2. Type the name of the application in the Search text box.

   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.

3. Decide which of these files belong to the to-be-deleted application.

   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

   • Have the same icon as the parent application
   • Are in the Preferences, Caches, or Application Support folders
4. In the Search Results window, click the associated file(s) that you want to delete and just drag them to the Trash.

   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.

   

Using a commercial cleanup tool

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.

Backing Up Your Treasure

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:

Back up. On a regular basis.

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.

Saving Files

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.

Backing up to an external hard drive

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):

1. Open separate Finder windows for
   • The external hard drive
   • The internal hard drive
2. Select the desired files that you want to back up from your internal drive.
3. Drag the selected files to the external drive window.

Backing up to CD and DVD

You can burn backup files to a recordable CD or DVD, if you have an internal or external optical drive.

Burning backups from the Finder

To use the Finder’s Burn feature to create a backup CD or DVD, follow these steps:

1. Load a blank disc into your iMac’s optical drive.

   If you’re using the default settings in the CDs & DVDs pane in System Preferences, a dialog appears, asking you to choose an action.

2. From the Action pop-up menu, choose Open Finder and then click OK.

   An icon named Untitled DVD appears on your Desktop. Double-click the icon to open a Finder window.

3. Drag the files and folders that you want to back up into the disc’s 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.

4. When you’re ready to record, click File and then choose Burn Disc from the Finder menu.

   You can also click the Burn button on the Recordable DVD bar, which appears at the top of the disc’s Finder window.

5. Choose the fastest recording speed possible.
6. Click Burn.

Burning backups from other recording applications

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.)

You can save that disc layout and use it again. This simplifies the process of backing up the same files in the future (if you don’t move folders or files from their current spot).

If you do decide to back up to CD/DVD or to an external backup drive without using Time Machine, it’s a good idea to store that backup media somewhere safe, away from calamities. On the other hand, if you back up with Time Machine — as I’m about to demonstrate — you should instead leave your external drive plugged in to your iMac.

Putting Things Right with Time Machine

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.

Apple’s AirPort Time Capsule device is designed as a wireless storage drive for your Time Machine backup files. If you’re interested in a single Time Machine backup location for multiple Macs across your wireless network, an AirPort Time Capsule is a great addition to your home or office.

Before you can use Time Machine, you must have it enabled within the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. I cover the Time Machine configuration settings (and how to turn the feature on) in more detail in Chapter 6. You’ll also need an external hard drive that provides considerably more storage capacity than the drive you’re backing up. I recommend that your external Time Machine backup drive be at least twice the capacity of the drive you’re backing up. (To check on the size of a drive displayed on your desktop, right-click the drive and choose Get Info.)

Here’s how you can turn back time, step by step, to restore a file that you deleted or replaced in a folder:

1. Open a Finder window and navigate to the folder that contained the file you want to restore.
2. Click the Time Machine icon on the Finder menu bar (which bears a clock with a counterclockwise arrow) and then click Enter Time Machine.

   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.

3. Click within the timeline to jump directly to a date (displaying the folder’s contents on that date).

   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.

   

4. After you locate the file you want to restore, click it to select it.
5. Click the Restore button at the right side of the Time Machine button bar.

   Time Machine returns you to the Finder, with the newly restored file now appearing in the folder. Out-standing!

To restore specific data from your Contacts database, launch the desired application first and then launch Time Machine. Instead of riffling through a Finder window, you can move through time within the application window.

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:

Get an external hard drive, connect it, and turn on Time Machine. Do it now. Don’t make a humongous mistake.

Maintaining Hard Drive Health

Shifty-eyed, sneaky, irritating little problems can bother your hard drive: permissions errors. Incorrect disk and file permissions can

• Make your iMac lock up
• Make applications act screwy (or refuse to run at all)
• Cause weird behavior within a Finder window or System Preferences

To keep Mavericks running at its best, I recommend that you fix permissions errors at least once per week. Follow these steps:

1. Click the Launchpad icon on the Dock and then click the Utilities icon.

   From the keyboard, press +Shift+U to open the Utilities folder directly in a new Finder window.

2. Double-click the Disk Utility icon.
3. Click the volume at the left that you want to check.

   Volume is just computer-speak for a named partition, like Macintosh HD, which appears under your physical hard drive.

4. Click the Repair Disk Permissions button.

   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?)

Automating Those Mundane Chores

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.

Creating an application in Automator

To create a simple application with Automator, launch the application and follow these steps:

1. Select Application and click Choose.
2. Click the desired item in the Library list.

   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.

3. Drag the desired action from the Library pane to the workflow pane.
4. Modify any specific settings provided for the action you chose.
5. Repeat Steps 1–3 to complete the workflow.
6. Click Run (upper right) to test your application.

   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.

   

7. When the application is working as you like, press +Shift+S to save it.
8. In the Save As dialog that appears, type a name for your new workflow.
9. Open the Where pop-up menu and specify a location where the file should be saved.
10. Open the File Format pop-up menu and choose Application.
11. Click Save.

    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.

To find all the actions of a certain type within the Library list, click in the Search box at the bottom of the Library pane and type in a keyword, such as save or burn. You don’t even need to press Return!

Running applications at startup

If your Automator application should run every time you log in, follow these steps to set it up as a Login Item:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Display the Users & Groups pane.
3. Click the Login Items button.
4. Click the plus button at the bottom of the list.
5. Navigate to the location of your new Automator application.
6. Click Add.

   Now your Automator application is really automatic.

Some third-party applications have their own Automator actions. Check the developer’s website often to see whether additional Automator applications have been added that you can download.

Updating OS X Automatically

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.

Update uses the Internet, so you need an Internet connection to shake hands with the Apple server and download any updates.

Software Update can be found in three convenient spots:

• The Apple menu: Click the Apple menu () and then click Software Update, which displays the Update window and alerts you to anything new that’s available.
• The App Store: Click the Updates pane to display available updates.
• System Preferences: Click the App Store icon to display the pane that you see in Figure 24-5.

  If you take the System Preferences route, you can set Mavericks to check for updates automatically:

  1. Select the Automatically Check for Updates check box.
  2. Make sure the Install App Updates and Install System Data Files and Security Updates check boxes are selected.

  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.

If you’ve installed applications from the App Store, you’ll be notified that updates are available for those applications by a tiny red circle next to the App Store icon in the Dock. (The number inside the circle indicates how many updates are available, much like the Mail icon on the Dock displays how many unread messages you have waiting for you.) Click the App Store icon to launch the Store and then click the Updates icon in the title bar.